Revenue from timber sales climbed to UAH 30.4 billion ($736 million), up UAH 6.7 billion year-on-year, while tax payments hit a record UAH 16.1 billion ($390 million) — up UAH 6.8 billion on 2024. Industry profitability reached 22.8 per cent, up 12.3 percentage points, with average monthly wages clearing UAH 30,000 — roughly $727 — after rising UAH 6,000 year-on-year.

Post-2020 reforms have driven the turnaround. Before those changes — when resources were greater and conditions far less punishing — the industry earned just UAH 0.2 billion, nearly 35 times less than today’s result. “This is the best proof that the reforms we implemented have proven effective,” Smal said.

Yuriy Bolokhovets, director general of Forests of Ukraine, said less money was disappearing off the books. Moving 97 per cent of procurement onto the Prozorro transparency platform saved more than UAH 700 million alone.

“Before the reforms, profits were lost. Today, financial flows work in the interests of the state and the industry,” Bolokhovets said.

“Increased profits mean record budget contributions, forest fire protection, support for the armed forces, and investment in technical modernisation.”

It comes amid ongoing uncertainty over Ukraine’s timber export position, with European markets closely watching supply flows as the war continues to constrain accessible forestry areas across the country’s east and north.

Boulton raised the prospect that EU anti-dumping measures on Chinese hardwood plywood had redirected volumes toward the UK — and that some of the increase could mask sanctioned Russian product. “We would urge our members and the wider industry to use all caution and take advantage of TDUK due diligence and responsible sourcing policy resources to make sure the timbers they purchase comply with all relevant EU and UK regulations,” he said.

Hardwood plywood imports rose 7.1 per cent. Total plywood volumes climbed 10.1 per cent to 1.32 million cubic metres — driven by stronger shipments from China, Malaysia and Brazil.

The broader picture was much weaker.

Demand has remained subdued for four consecutive years, and softwood — which accounts for around 61 per cent of all UK timber imports — fell four per cent to 5.55 million cubic metres. Sweden, Germany and the Irish Republic all shipped less. Latvia and Finland picked up some of the slack. Average softwood prices still rose, reaching £289 per cubic metre against £256 in 2024.

Hardwood came in at 431,000 cubic metres. Tropical species were down 9.7 per cent. Mixed hardwoods moved the other way, rising ten per cent to 115,000 cubic metres, with Cameroon holding its position as the dominant source of tropical supply. Particleboard had a strong year, climbing 10.1 per cent to 637,000 cubic metres. MDF did not — volumes dropped 23 per cent to 544,000 cubic metres. Engineered wood was similarly split. Laminated veneer lumber and I-beams both grew solidly, while cross-laminated timber fell 23.6 per cent.

Boulton said the headline figure obscured a more complicated picture: “Much of the reduction in overall volume was driven by lower softwood and MDF imports, while several other product categories recorded strong growth during the year.”

The housing and construction sectors remain the key variable. Forecasters expect softwood volumes to recover around 3.7 per cent in 2026 — but that recovery depends on confidence returning to a market that has been flat for the better part of four years.

Led by Marc Grünig, Werner Rammer, and Cornelius Senf, the study was conducted by researchers at the Technical University of Munich under the senior authorship of Rupert Seidl, Professor of Ecosystem Dynamics and Forest Management at TUM “Climate Change Will Increase Forest Disturbances in Europe Throughout the 21st Century” maps the impact of climate on stock.

The reference period the team used as a baseline is telling. The years from 1986 to 2020 were already marked by unusually high disturbance levels — yet even under the most optimistic scenario, with warming held to roughly two degrees Celsius, future damage is projected to exceed that elevated benchmark. Under a four-degree trajectory, the disturbed forest area more than doubles.

It comes as Wood Central reported that storms, bark-beetle outbreaks and extreme weather could wipe out up to €247 billion in standing European timber over the same time, with Central Europe already emerging as the continent’s costliest disturbance hotspot under modelling.

Southern and western Europe face the most severe projected changes.

And the researchers warn that damage hotspots will emerge across northern Europe too — and with European timber markets deeply interconnected, localised forest losses have a habit of becoming everyone’s problem at the sawmill and the building site.

The model itself was trained on 135 million data points drawn from forest simulations across 13,000 European locations, layered with multi-decadal satellite data — projecting future disturbance trajectories down to a single hectare, a level of regional precision previously unavailable to policymakers or forest managers:

How much carbon a forest stores, how reliably it supplies timber, and what species it supports — all of it is governed by disturbance levels, and the numbers on all three are headed in one direction. Seidl’s team is pushing for forest policy to get ahead of it, arguing that rising disturbance, while destructive, also creates openings to replace vulnerable monocultures with more climate-resilient forest structures.

“We need to be prepared for significant forest damage in the coming years,” Seidl said. “Forestry must address both the risks and opportunities of rising disturbance levels, supported by new scientific methods and insights.”

The research was conducted under the EU-coordinated Resonate project — Resilient Forests for Society — led by the European Forest Institute.

• For further information: Grünig, M.; Rammer, W.; Senf, C. et al: Climate change will increase forest disturbances in Europe throughout the 21st century, Science 2026, DOI: 10.1126/science.adx6329

Automated Architecture, or AUAR, makes portable micro-factories that produce the full wooden framing of a house — walls, floors and roofs — in 24 hours. Co-founder Mollie Claypool told CNN the system produces timber panels more quickly, more cheaply, and more precisely than a conventional framing crew, freeing carpenters to focus on construction rather than component manufacturing.

It’s a claim the building and construction supply chain wants to stress-test — but the underlying model is sound.

Architects send building plans to AUAR’s AI-powered software, the Master Builder, which calculates how many panels are needed and exactly how much timber a developer needs to purchase.

The micro-factory — which fits inside a standard shipping container — is dispatched directly to the building site with an operator, who uses a robotic arm to measure, cut, and nail timber into panels, leaving precise openings for windows, doors, wiring, and plumbing. Contractors fit the panels by hand.

One micro-factory, Claypool says, can produce the framing for a typical house in about a day — a process she says would take a conventional timber-framing crew four weeks. On cost, AUAR claims its service runs 30% cheaper than a standard framing crew and up to 15% cheaper than ordering prefabricated panels from a large off-site factory and transporting them to the site.

The system can build parts for buildings up to seven storeys high.

AUAR can also respond to timber’s natural variations. It accounts for knots, bends, and warps — calculating the most efficient cutting pattern from available stock to reduce waste. “The precision of the finished panels produces a tighter building envelope,” Claypool adds, “lowering heat loss and improving the energy efficiency of the finished home.”

AUAR currently operates three micro-factories across the US and EU, with five more scheduled for delivery this year. So far, it has raised £7.7 million, with 600,000 square metres of panels in production — enough to build hundreds of homes. But Claypool’s ambition is to grow that to 1,000 micro-factories on sites by 2030, producing 200,000 homes every year.

Wood Central understands the company is in active discussions with several new US partners as part of what it describes as a growth phase, following its 2024 partnership with construction investment firm Rival Holdings. That makes sense, given 94 per cent of single-family homes built in 2024 were timber-framed, and Goldman Sachs has identified the country’s housing shortfall — estimated at between 1.5 and 5.5 million homes — as the root of its affordability crisis.

None of this is happening in a vacuum. As Wood Central reported in December, Europe’s most advanced robotic prefab plants are already showing what zero-labour panel production looks like at scale — floor and wall assemblies delivered flat-pack to site with, as Timber Development Association CEO Andrew Dunn put it after touring those facilities, “not a single Allen key in sight.”

The question is whether those models can be adapted to local conditions, supply chains and building standards — and how quickly.

That urgency is reflected in where research dollars are flowing. Australian Forest & Wood Innovations (AFWI) — a $200 million research and development fund backed by $100 million in federal funding by the Australian government — has already committed to projects targeting exactly this gap, including the Automated Design for Prefabrication in Timber Construction and The Precinct, a large-scale centre to process wood fibre into frames, trusses, wall panels and flooring at manufacturing scale.

Back in the UK, David Philp — chair of the Chartered Institute of Building’s digital and innovation advisory panel, and not involved with AUAR — told CNN the window for treating this technology as optional had closed.

“These innovations were an opportunity a few years ago, but now they’re a necessity. They’re not a nice-to-have anymore — they’re key to any construction business model.”

But the remaining barriers are not technical, he said. It’s cultural — particularly in England, where just 9% of homes built in 2019 were timber-framed, compared to 92% in Scotland. “The technology and standards are there — the real barrier is culture. We’ve got deeply ingrained traditional ways of working, so the challenge now is people and change, not tools and processes.”

AUAR is not alone. London-based Facit Technologies produces on-site micro-factories for wooden components, while US-based Cuby Technologies uses modular production units that combine to handle various construction elements. What distinguishes AUAR’s portable, container-delivered model is its flexibility — particularly relevant for regional and remote sites where logistics costs make centralised prefabrication plants impractical.

As for the broader picture, Claypool isn’t shy about what’s at stake. “Good homes are not just a construction problem,” she told CNN. “It’s a social problem. When homes are scarce, and we’re slow to build them, everything else suffers.”

• To learn why the UK’s largest contractors are looking to modern methods of construction – like prefabrication using mass timber parts – to meet the country’s target of 300,000 new dwellings each year, click here for Wood Central’s special feature from August 2025.

That is according to Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service, which has formally declared the crisis systemic — a finding backed by the Moscow Times, which reported timber harvesting fell 13 per cent in 2024 compared to pre-war levels, with lumber production down 11 per cent and plywood output collapsing 23 per cent. The cause, analysts say, is structural. Not cyclical.

Before the war, Russia accounted for roughly 22 per cent of the global softwood lumber trade. Western companies exited en masse, equipment imports stopped, and FSC and PEFC stripped Russian timber of its sustainability certifications. Export revenue collapsed from $12.5 billion in 2021 to $9.8 billion.

China is now the last major market standing — and even that is slipping.

Last year, Fastmarkets reporter Sanjoy Narayan told the 2025 International Softwood Conference that Chinese volumes fell by 10 per cent year-on-year in the first half of 2025, as market prices remained depressed. And as bad as the market is right now, it’s not the biggest problem. That distinction belongs to the machines.

An estimated 90 per cent of imported harvesters and forwarders currently operating in Russia will cease to function by 2028, according to the intelligence assessment. Sanctions cut off access to the Western manufacturers — John Deere, Ponsse, and Komatsu Forest — that serviced the bulk of Russia’s professional logging fleet, and domestic machine builders cannot fill the gap, with the shortfall estimated at several thousand units over the next two to three years.

Today, Wood Central revealed that, rather than prop up the industry, the Kremlin is planning to raise rental rates on forest plots by between 40-50 per cent — a move the intelligence service warns will “further reduce the attractiveness of the forestry sector for investors and workers.” Compounding that are potential restrictions on bank account withdrawals inside Russia — a measure that would trap workers and capital inside a sector already haemorrhaging both.

Speaking before a Federation Council committee, Deputy Industry and Trade Minister Mikhail Yurin acknowledged the sector had entered a “downward trend,” flagging a worst-case drop of 20 to 30 per cent in output in 2026, with further declines possible into 2027 “if geopolitical conditions deteriorate further.”

• To learn more about the impact of Russia’s sanctions on the global supply chains for forest products, click here for Wood Central’s special feature.

It comes as Russia’s forest industry “is going through one of the most tense periods in its modern history,” the Russian Pulp and Paper Association warned in a letter to Industry and Trade Minister Denis Manturov, before the rent bills even arrived. Logging volumes had already fallen more than 10 per cent year on year in 2025, “20–30 per cent below the average metrics for the last decade,” according to Nikolay Ivanov, Segezha Group Executive Board Member.

Wood Central understands that a government resolution that took effect on January 1, 2024, is at the centre of the dispute — a ruling that changed how forest lease distances are measured and pushed hundreds of plots into higher rate brackets overnight, while removing a 0.9 reduction factor common across northwest Russia. Regional forestry authorities had held off on collecting retroactive payments after guidance from Rosleskhoz, but that changed once an Accounts Chamber audit landed in late 2025, with companies reporting that bills they had never budgeted for began arriving last month.

It comes amid mounting pressure on some of Russia’s largest producers.

The Ilim Group, Russia’s largest timber company by harvesting volume, has estimated the additional charges at roughly 3.3 billion rubles across 2024–2026. Segezha Group, once the world’s second-largest producer of multiwall sack paper and industrial paper sacks, has already halted two plants in northwest Russia, with ULC Group also running two sawmills idle — the latest casualty in a sector Wood Central has tracked since sanctions first hit in 2022.

Russia had staked much of its post-sanctions survival on redirecting volumes east, but that strategy has run into a prolonged property construction downturn, leaving exporters with few options. Softwood lumber exports to China fell 8 per cent year-on-year to 4.37 million m³ in January–May 2025, according to Lesprom Network. “Attempts to redirect exports to Asia have faced challenges, including price pressure from Chinese buyers and severe congestion on the Russian Railways’ Eastern route,” Lesprom said. Chinese buyers know they have leverage. They are using it.

The Central Bank of Russia has held its key rate at 16 per cent throughout, with borrowing costs absorbing roughly 25 per cent of sawmill profits and margins squeezed to around 4 per cent, even before the retroactive lease bills landed. The Russian Pulp and Paper Association has urged Manturov to form a dedicated industry task force, warning that, without immediate support, many producers risk halting operations entirely — a plea that, as Wood Central reported last year, has gone unanswered.

Companies are now asking the government to scrap retroactive recalculations entirely and limit new rate rules to contracts signed after January 1, 2024. Russia’s Ministry of Economic Development has reported GDP fell 2.1 per cent year on year in January 2026, with Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service estimating the 2025 federal budget deficit at 8.01 trillion rubles, equivalent to 3.7 per cent of GDP, against an official figure of 2.6 per cent. Moscow is not flush. Whether it has the room or the appetite to offer struggling sawmill operators any relief at all remains to be seen.

It comes after Iran’s Revolutionary Guard issued a warning on February 28 to every vessel in the Strait of Hormuz: the waterway was closing, and any ship attempting to pass would be set “ablaze.” By the following morning, traffic was down 80%…with the strait closed to all vessels on Monday.

As it stands, 170 containerships carrying 450,000 TEU, 1.4% of the global container fleet, are stranded inside the strait with no clear path out, according to Linerlytica co-founder Hua Joo Tan.

All four of the world’s largest container shipping operators have suspended operations. Maersk has formally invoked Clause 20 of its Bill of Lading — a force majeure provision — implementing an Emergency Freight Increase across all cargo to and from the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq, and Oman.

The current crisis is structurally different from anything the world has faced before. When Houthi attacks forced vessels off the Suez route in 2024, the Cape of Good Hope was painful but passable. However, a Hormuz closure removes the destination, leaving no available detour.

What is at stake in the Gulf

The MENA region has, in recent years, become one of the most important and consequential growth markets for timber exporters. Last year, Wood Central reported that Russia shipped 1.7 million cubic metres of lumber there in 2024, whilst the American Hardwood Export Council has successfully grown trade in the United Arab Emirates (up 27%), Saudi Arabia (up 8%) and Egypt (up 15%) on the back of major projects in the region.

However, that pipeline is now stalled at the port gate.

“The Persian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz and adjacent waters are the most dangerous place right now for commercial shipping,” according to Jakob Larsen, BIMCO’s Chief Safety and Security Officer, who spoke to Fox News on Sunday. “Ships in the Persian Gulf are under threat from Iranian attacks — they’re trying to depart to get away from the threat zone.”

It is a pattern that timber exporters have felt before.

During last June’s 12-day Israel-Iran war, Mike Cardin, of Tennessee-based Cardin Forest Products, was one of scores of traders who had rerouted Gulf-bound hardwood shipments. “If it keeps escalating, there won’t be any orders coming in for the next, who knows how long,” he told Fox Business at the time. Whilst his brother Jarrod was more blunt: “Right now, no one knows what’s going to happen. It’s shut down that export market pretty much. It’s a little painful — we’re stuck with warehouses full.”

That conflict passed within two weeks…but this one could drag on much longer.

Finland, Russia, and the wider exposure

The current disruption reaches beyond Gulf-facing exporters. “Approximately 20% of the forest industry’s exports go to Asia, and the majority of those shipments pass through the Suez Canal,” said Maarit Lindström, Director and Chief Economist at the Finnish Forest Industries Federation. If vessels are forced to reroute around southern Africa, journeys extend by thousands of kilometres — delays of several weeks are possible.

“If the situation continues, it will affect freight prices and competition for containers,” Lindström warned. Of Finland’s Asian exports, roughly half is pulp, with wood products accounting for 26%, cartonboard 15%, and paper 8% — all product lines now facing extended transit times and tightening container availability. Finland exports approximately €3 million worth of forest products to Qatar alone each year.

Until last week, freight markets were recovering after two years of major instability in the region. A Red Sea return in late 2026 had been one of the few tailwinds analysts were counting on — lower rates, shorter transit times, freed-up capacity. “The repercussions of the joint military operation will see the further weaponisation of trade and shatter hopes of a large-scale return of container shipping to the Red Sea in 2026,” said Peter Sand, chief analyst at Xeneta.

And there is a second cost that the mainstream has largely missed. QatarEnergy halted production following attacks on its facilities, sending gas prices up 50% in two days. With the Strait carrying 22% of global LNG, Asian based sawmills running on gas could face an energy cost spike on top of the freight hit.

A consortium led by KCP Holdings has completed a debt purchase from existing lenders Cheyne Capital and Cross Ocean Partners. KCP is a New York-headquartered investment firm established in 1952, with offices in London, Singapore, and Washington, DC.

Wood Central understands that it will shortly enter into an agreement to acquire 100% of Sunseeker’s shares. The transaction is subject to UK regulatory approvals under the National Security and Investment Act, expected to clear within weeks. All 2,000 Dorset jobs and shipyard operations continue as normal in the meantime.

Andrés Rubio steps in as permanent CEO, replacing Scott Millar, the Teneo senior managing director who held the role on an interim basis since December. Millar took over following Andrea Frabetti’s departure after six years at the helm. Rubio spent three decades in commercial leadership across the US, Europe and Asia, most recently as CEO of pan-European credit management firm Intrum AB and before that as Senior Partner at Apollo Management International.

“I have long admired Sunseeker as the pinnacle of luxury yacht building, and its heritage genuinely sets it apart,” Rubio said. “It is an honour to be leading the business at such an exciting time and with a clear path to transformative growth.”

“I am also privileged to be joining a highly experienced leadership team and a dedicated workforce that is the heart and soul of the Sunseeker brand. We now have committed owners, an established leadership team, an industry-leading Chairman, and a clear plan. With the backing of KCP and Lionheart and an accelerated focus on delivering our ambitions, I look forward to the opportunities ahead.”

Joining him is Antony Sheriff as Non-Executive Chairman. Sheriff has sat on the Sunseeker board since November 2024 and previously served as Executive Chairman of Plymouth rival Princess Yachts and, before that, CEO of McLaren Automotive.

So what does KCP actually want with Sunseeker?

Wood Central understands the new owners are backing Sunseeker’s existing business plan in full, covering next-generation product development, a return to Superyacht building, and a transformation of the operating model. KCP is investing alongside Miami-based Lionheart Capital, one of two private equity firms that first acquired Sunseeker in 2024.

Sources close to the deal say the priority is straightforward: get Sunseeker building British again. The new owners want the brand to focus on larger yachts and superyachts, with the performance reputation the yard spent decades building put back at the forefront of every decision.

The backdrop is not pretty. June 2025 brought 200 redundancies, around 10 per cent of the workforce, with management pointing to weak global demand and the fallout from US trade tariffs. By November, lenders had injected fresh capital, Frabetti was gone, and Sunseeker had installed new sales and marketing leadership in Mark Chinery and Mario Gornati. Five yachts were sold at the 2026 Miami Yacht Show. The 21-model range still ships to more than 60 countries.

Whether that’s enough of a foundation is now Rubio’s problem.

“This is a significant milestone, one that provides the financial stability and long-term commitment the business needs to deliver on its ambitions,” KCP said. “Sunseeker prepares for its next chapter of growth.”

It comes as an estimated 7,000 tonnes of paper machine clothing is discarded from paper machines across Europe each year, with most of it currently burned or sent to landfill. The program, which launched at industrial scale in January 2025, collects end-of-life fabrics and felts made from polyamide (PA) and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) at several UPM mills in Finland and Germany, with HolyPoly coordinating the collection and ensuring the material is recycled in full compliance with European regulations.

Each tonne of recycled paper machine clothing prevents roughly three tonnes of CO₂ emissions that would otherwise result from incineration, and the recycled material is already substituting virgin polymers in new components, with demand described as high and the process fully scalable.

Heiner Schütte, Senior Sourcing Manager at UPM, told Andritz that the collaboration represented a step-change in how the company manages its waste streams. “We at UPM are delighted to collaborate with Andritz and HolyPoly to recycle our used paper machine clothing,” Schütte said. “With this initiative, we are moving the utilisation of used paper machine clothing higher up the waste hierarchy, from energy recovery to material recycling.”

In parallel, Andritz is working to optimise the quality and specifications of the recycled granulate, with the long-term goal of feeding the material back into the manufacture of new paper machine clothing — a move that would close the loop entirely. The initiative also forms part of Andritz’s broader push to meet the EU’s planned extended producer responsibility (EPR) requirements.

That is according to Metsä Wood, which confirmed its Kerto LVL was used for the entire load-bearing structure of the Xylino complex in Almere — named after the Greek word for wood — a project developed by housing corporation De Alliantie and constructor Koopmans Bouwgroep, with all modules manufactured off-site by geWOONhout.

The building delivers a mix of mid-market rental units, social housing apartments and ground-level residences, supported by a semi-underground parking structure and a shared car-free courtyard. It comes as the EU pours money into industrialised timber construction to tackle chronic housing shortages across the continent.

Wood Central understands each module arrived on site with plumbing, electrical and ventilation already installed, and that the structural system — four corner columns with integrated floor and roof elements — locks together without the need for a concrete core, a significant departure from conventional multi-storey residential construction.

And whilst CLT is the more common choice in mass timber construction, geWOONhout went with Kerto LVL — a product manufactured from 3-millimetre-thick veneers glued together, either uniformly or with 20 per cent laid crosswise depending on application — which Metsä Wood says is up to 50 per cent more resource-efficient than comparable mass timber products whilst delivering equivalent structural performance.

Sprint construction: four apartments a day

Installation followed what Metsä Wood called a sprint-based approach — ditching the traditional linear schedule in favour of rapid, concentrated bursts of activity — with teams placing eight to twelve modules per day and assembling three to four apartments simultaneously.

“This system is ready to be repeated,” according to Bas Broeke, Project Manager at Koopmans Bouwgroep. “The way it works here means we can apply it in many more places.”

CNC machining held tolerances to within 0.5 millimetres across all components, and every part in the system has a digital twin accessible via a QR code — containing dimensions, specifications, and end-of-life instructions that support both manufacturing consistency today and disassembly in the future.

The project also achieves R120 fire classification, providing 120 minutes of structural resistance as required for Dutch buildings exceeding 13 metres in height, whilst acoustic performance is delivered through olivine aggregate added to the floors — a mineral that also captures CO₂ — combined with acoustic decouplers between modules to prevent sound transmission.

And the environmental credentials extend far beyond the structure, with lighter foundations reducing transport emissions, PEFC-certified wood sourced throughout demonstrating responsible sourcing, and all site operations powered by solar. The completed buildings even feature solar panels, high-performance insulation and rainwater harvesting, whilst modules are designed from the outset for disassembly and material recovery. Low-carbon concrete was deployed only for the semi-underground parking facility.

Speaking about the project, Aafke Van der Werf, Director of geWOONhout — which manufactured all 436 modules — said the result speaks for itself. “The best thing about Xylino is that you can’t tell from the outside that it was built using industrialised methods,” she said. “To me, that proves that architectural freedom and modular construction can go hand in hand.”