Beef Retakes Uruguay’s Top Export Ranking as Pulp Prices Fall
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Uruguay XXI has put the average cellulose price 13 per cent lower at $530 a tonne for 2025 even as shipment volumes climbed, with the agency's new sector report leaving pulp off a growth list built around wood processing, construction, biomass, and certification.
Logs stacked for export at the port of Montevideo, the cheap end of a trade that earned $103 million in 2025 while pulp carried $2,317 million of the sector's $2,786 million year. (Photo Credit: Julio Etchart / Alamy)
Three pulp mills shipped record volumes out of Uruguay in 2025 and earned 9 per cent less than the year before, handing the title of the country’s biggest export back to beef after a single year. That is according to Uruguay XXI, the state investment and export agency, whose 78-page sector report published on 31 July counts US$2,786 million in forestry exports and builds its investment case on sawmills, plywood, and construction timber rather than pulp.
The agency puts the fall down to price, not demand, with the average tonne fetching $530 compared with $610 a year earlier, even as shipped volumes reached 4.4 million tonnes. Counted as a whole sector instead of a single product, forestry still cleared the meat trade, with the $2,786 million total finishing a fraction above beef’s record $2,680 million.
Wood Central chart from Uruguay XXI data. Bars show volume shipped in million tonnes, line shows average price per tonne, with 2025 at a record 4.4 million tonnes and $530 a tonne.
Europe absorbed the sharpest of the reversal, with cellulose shipments into the European Union falling 26 per cent while the United States climbed 23 per cent into third place and China, which takes 45 per cent of the pulp, finished 2 per cent lower. All of it comes from three plants, with UPM’s mills at Fray Bentos and Paso de los Toros and the Montes del Plata joint venture at Punta Pereira consuming nearly 17 million cubic metres of wood a year and carrying $2,317 million, or 83 per cent, of the sector’s export value.
UPM’s Fray Bentos complex on the Uruguay River, one of the three mills consuming nearly 17 million cubic metres of wood a year between them and carrying $2,317 million of the sector’s export value. (Photo Credit: UPM)
Alongside those three, the report counts 128 sawmilling and plywood operations that processed 2.6 million cubic metres of wood in 2025 and exported 76 per cent of what they produced. Sawn timber left the country at $654 a tonne, seven times the average price of raw logs, the widest value gap the report records between a processed product and the fibre behind it.
Forest biomass supplied 50 per cent of Uruguay’s primary energy matrix in the same year, according to the agency, with the UPM and Montes del Plata generators among those putting wood residue on par with every other primary source in the country combined. More than 90 per cent of the plantation estate carries FSC or PEFC certification, a record Uruguay XXI names as the sector’s entry ticket into European and North American markets now gated by deforestation-linked import rules.
A eucalyptus haul leaves a plantation stand on the northern roads, part of an estate covering 1.16 million hectares, or 6.6 per cent of Uruguay, across 4,135 mostly small companies. (Photo Credit: reisegraf.ch / Alamy)
That estate covers 1.16 million hectares, or 6.6 per cent of the national territory, and supports more than 19,000 direct jobs at 4,135 companies, most of them micro and small operators rather than the three mills carrying the export value. Automation explains the split on the report’s own analysis, which found cellulose generated $827 million of exported value added with 2,824 workers in 2022 while the wood industries employed 6,735 people for $158 million.
It comes as three solid-wood projects moved toward production through the first half of the year, with Lumin finishing a $136 million plywood mill at Melo, Urufor building a $100 million pine sawmill at Rivera for a July start on the report’s schedule, and BrasPine breaking ground nearby. Lumin built the Melo line for 164,000 cubic metres a year, enough, on chief executive Álvaro Molinari’s count, to take the company to nearly 500,000 cubic metres and make Uruguay Latin America’s second-largest plywood producer.
Rivera carries the largest of the three commitments, with BrasPine committing $250 million to its first operation outside Brazil, targeting production in 2027, backed by 18,800 hectares bought from the Bosques del Uruguay trust. The pine estate those mills will draw on has been shrinking, falling from 185,000 hectares in 2011 to 128,497 hectares in 2024.
Cross-laminated and glue-laminated timber gives the sector its highest-value outlet, with Arboreal running what the company credits as South America’s largest CLT and glulam plant at Tacuarembó and putting a $40 million IFC and ILX financing package toward a thermally modified timber line this year.
“Sawn timber is gaining prominence,” Francisco Bonino, chief executive of Agroempresa Forestal, told Forbes Uruguay after the pulp construction boom, warning that new plants must plan long term or risk running short of fibre as Canada now has. Bonino’s company opened the $7 million Olimar veneer line at Treinta y Tres in 2024, the first industrial move by one of Uruguay’s largest holders of forested land.
Uruguay XXI credits the 1987 Forestry Law and four decades of policy continuity across eight governments with the $2,786 million the sector earned in 2025, and puts that continuity at the centre of its case to investors. The same report sends those investors toward wood processing, construction, biomass, and certification, and leaves off the list the product that earned $2,317 million of the total.
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