Sawlogs Now Cost Central Europe’s Mills Twice Their Pandemic Low
Germany’s spruce and fir harvest halved to 32 million cubic metres between 2021 and 2025, whilst far less beetle-damaged timber now leaves its forests.
Cut logs marked in green paint beside a forest track in Germany. Sawlog prices in Germany and Austria reached 201 per cent of their July 2020 level by July, Gerd Ebner told the International Softwood Conference. (Photo Credit: ID 116379704 © Julienviedts | Dreamstime.com)
Sawmills in Germany and Austria are paying twice as much for logs as they did in mid-2020, even as German sawn softwood output heads for its lowest year since 2004. That is according to Gerd Ebner, editor-in-chief of the Austrian timber journal Holzkurier, who told the International Softwood Conference in Dublin late last month that log prices in Germany and Austria reached 201 per cent of their July 2020 level by July.
“The cuts to new-build funding planned in the draft 2027 federal budget are a step in the wrong direction,” Dr Stephan Lang, president of Germany’s sawmill and wood industry federation, DeSH, said last week.
German mills are buying those logs as builders head for fewer than 200,000 home completions this year, the fewest since 2011, with DeSH counting its industry’s output down nearly 9 per cent in the eight months to August. Meanwhile, logs have climbed far faster than the timber sawn from them, with the national wood industry federation, HDH, counting log prices in Germany at more than double their 2021 level whilst sawn timber sells for little more than it did then.
Yet the climb started from a pandemic low, with Ebner’s journal recording that spruce log prices in Austria and southern Germany bottomed out in June 2020 at their lowest since its survey began in 2006. That low gave way to records last year, when Wood Central reported German spruce and pine prices passing €130 a cubic metre, their highest in 35 years, as fewer bark beetle fellings starved mills of salvage wood.
Since then, log prices in Germany have eased only this autumn, with the Mitterfels forest owners’ association in Bavaria settling spruce at 123 euros a cubic metre for deliveries to January, 5 euros below the previous quarter. Most sawmillers expect no quick relief, with just a third of those Ebner’s journal surveyed in October expecting log prices to fall over the next three months.
At the same time, Germany’s spruce and fir harvest fell from 62 million cubic metres in 2021 to 32 million in 2025, Ebner said, with far less beetle-damaged wood now coming out of Central Europe’s forests. The country’s pine harvest has risen 30 per cent to 13.1 million cubic metres, he told delegates, yet sawmills still accept pine “only if no spruce is available”.
Spruce killed by bark beetles on the Brocken in Germany’s Harz mountains, pictured in 2020. Germany’s spruce and fir harvest halved between 2021 and 2025, with far less beetle-damaged wood now reaching mills. (Photo Credit: Hajotthu via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0)
Looking further ahead, Ebner expects less spruce overall, warning that its long-term resilience is in danger across Central Europe, particularly at lower elevations, where 805 million cubic metres of Germany’s spruce stood below 600 metres in 2018. Even so, the region is still adding capacity, with Ebner counting more than 100 new builds and expansions between 2023 and 2027, 18 of them sawmill projects.
It comes as the European Organisation of the Sawmill Industry (EOS) reported yet another fall in lumber prices this autumn, warning that securing logs at affordable prices “will be an issue which will dominate the markets in coming years”. Sweden’s sawlog prices climbed faster still, to 242 per cent by June, Ebner said, with Joonas Vitri, managing director of Binderholz Nordic, saying earlier this year that “the price of raw material is unsustainably expensive”.
Next week, DeSH gathers the industry in Wiesbaden for its Deutscher Holzkongress, which is set to debate the long-term security of Germany’s wood supply alongside the competitiveness of its mills. The federation also wants faster, nationally uniform approvals for modular timber building, with Lang saying timber construction “can make an important contribution, if we finally manage to move faster from planning to building”.
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