Widening price gap in the past years

Completely different developments

Reason enough to take a closer look at the different developments of the products. After all, not all products benefited equally from the record upward trend. On the contrary, various calamities led to heavy losses when it comes to the raw material.

For a multi-year comparison, it is best to combine prices into single quarters before indexing them. The first quarter of 2015 serves as starting point for the analysis. At the time, the accumulation of damaged wood had not yet reached an unusual dimension, and the sales indicator was at 105%, a value which indicates a good, but not very good sales situation.

Close correlation: log wood and sawmill byproducts

In the period under review, log and wood chip prices saw an identical downward development. In the first quarter of 2015, both values were relatively high. Since then, however, there was a considerable drop of 40 percentage points. While the log price recovered by 10 percentage points in the fourth quarter of 2020, the wood chip price saw a further decrease. In the past six years, there was practically a continuous fall of log wood and sawmill byproduct prices.

Glued timber near an all-time high

Logically, there is a close correlation between the price of laminations for glulam and the price of the end product glue-laminated timber. Both prices are 5 percentage points higher than in 2015. Laminations for glulam thus reached the highest value since the start of the sales indicator (on average € 227/m³, fresh). The glulam price is also only € 10/m³ away from the all-time high.

Last year, however, there was a time when glulam producers were able to raise prices more than what would have been justifiable in light of the increase in lamination prices. The price increase in the fourth quarter of 2020 (+13 percentage points) required a considerable further adjustment of the end product price as well (+5 percentage points).

US not for the faint-hearted

The price rollercoaster in the US is known to be “beyond good and evil” in the period under review.

The index had fallen by 11 percentage points from 100% in the first quarter of 2015 before it soared by 53%, reaching its then all-time high in the second quarter of 2018. A drop to under 100% followed before the index skyrocketed to 174% in the third quarter. From the current perspective, it cannot be excluded that this is the end of the story.