Chairman of the Association of Indonesian panel wood (APKINDO): USE OF SENGON WOOD FOR PLYWOOD KEEPS INCREASING

The Association of Indonesian Panel Wood (APKINDO) advised producers of the plywood industry to make diversification of raw materials from forest wood to people’s wood. The diversification was necessary considering that the supply of natural forest wood as raw material tend to diminish in the past few years and the decrease was predicted to continue even till this year 2010.

Nyoto Suhardjojo, Chairman of Marketing Dept APKINDO disclosed to BusinessNews Monday (14/6) the plywood industry

in Indonesia today was beginning to use people’s forest wood, namely Sengon woods as raw material. Lately the plywood industry was using less natural forest wood because the price was too expensive to be absorbed by the domestic market, so the plywood industry turned to the less expensive Sengon woods.

“The motivating factors of increasing use of sengon wood in the domestic pllllywood industry is apart from the diminishing yields of natural wood forest also because of the extremely high price of natural forest wood, so plywood producers choose Sengon as raw materials as alternative” Nyoto remarked.

To illustrate, today the price of Jati teakwood is posted at Rp 3.5 million per cubic meter while the top quality teakwood might reach Rp 9 million to Rp 9 million per cubic meter. All are on account of scarcity of teakwood, to consider that the life cycle of teak wood can reach 20 years. Compare this to the price of Sengon which is only Rp 600,000 per cubic meter while the harvest time of Sengon is much shorter, i.e. only six years. Productivity of Sengon woods are also higher, i.e. 100 cube meter per hectare, compared to natural forest wood (teakwood) which only yields 40 cube meter hectare.

In terms of quality, Sengon-based plywood is not inferior to plywood of natural forest wood. It seems reasonable that the Sengon wood industry grows abundantly in the past few years. Based on data of APKINDO, total utility of people’s (Sengon) wood had risen to 2 million cube meters in 2009against 500,000 cube meter in 2006. By 2010, production of Sengon wood is projected to certainly grow especially with the exodus of industrial players from outside Java to exploit Sengon wood for plywood production.