Turnover higher than ever before

In the Timber-Online economic survey, 64% of respondents report a “good” business situation in the last quarter. 33% describe it as “satisfactory” and 3% as “bad”. As to the current quarter, almost half of the interviewed sawmills expects a “good” development (46%) whereas the other half expects a “satisfactory” development (49%). Only 3% of respondents believe that the situation will deteriorate in the current quarter.

Satisfactory development of turnover

In the past two years, the percentage of sawmills which described their turnover of the last quarter as “high” rose from 12 to 41%. At the moment, 51% report “satisfactory” sales and 8% rate them as “low”. Sentiment regarding turnover in the current quarter is positive but noticeably more cautious compared to three months ago. 18% expect “growing”, 79% “stable” and 3% “falling” sales. At the end of the first quarter, 62% believed that turnover would grow and 38% thought that it would remain constant.

Stable log and sawn timber prices

Contrary to three months ago, most sawmills expect a steady development of selling prices. 23% of respondents believe that prices will rise, 69% think that they will remain stable and 8% expect them to drop. At the end of March, 67% expected “rising” sawn timber prices. Note: The sawn timber price index, published by the Association of The Austrian Timber Industry, grew by 4.6 points from March to May, reaching 132.8% (January 2001 = 100%).

As to log prices, the majority of respondents believe that there will be no significant changes. 10% expect “rising”, 51% “stable” and 38% “falling” raw material prices for their own company.

Willingness to invest remains high

In 2016, sentiment regarding the sawmill industry’s willingness to invest slowly started to improve. At the time, about 80% of respondents rated it as “low”. Today, this percentage dropped to 5%. Half of the respondents describe the sector’s current willingness to invest as “high” and 41% as “stable”.