Time for US hardwoods
AHEC’s Regional Director visits Sydney and Melbourne
AHEC’s Regional Director travelled to Sydney and Melbourne at the beginning of March and held meetings with five of Australia’s leading hardwood veneer and lumber importers and distributors. In all cases, the view on American hardwoods is that market demand is increasing, as a result of a number of factors, including a favourable exchange rate, the desire of specifiers to try new products and looks, the re-emergence of wood as an in vogue material and the increasingly limited access to native Australian hardwoods.
In fact, one major stockist stressed how the “time for US hardwoods” is now here and that there are likely to be severe shortfalls in the supply of domestic hardwood species such as Victorian ash and Tasmanian oak in the coming years as a direct result of fewer logging concessions in the presence of tough, and perhaps misguided, environmental legislation.