Vietnam Turns Untraceable Logs Into Furniture Sold Worldwide
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Lao mills sell export papers by the truck and Cambodian concessions cut inside national parks, with EIA naming the 30-year exporter whose furniture goes to China, Japan, and the US.
Trucks with covered loads on National Route 9 near Xethamouak in Savannakhet, the Lao province whose registered companies EIA's trade data ranks among the heaviest suppliers of timber to Vietnam. (Photo Credit: © EIA)
Exporters in Vietnam sell US$17 billion worth of wood products to the world each year, and the logs reaching their factories from Laos and Cambodia arrive with paperwork that says nothing reliable about the forests they came from, while the finished furniture and housing components leave for China, Europe, Japan, and the United States. That is according to the Environmental Investigation Agency, whose Manufactured Legality report last month names Bao Hoang, a Quy Nhon processor with 30 years in the trade, as a buyer from a Cambodian company it records shipping 102 loads of sawn wood to Vietnam under an export ban.
Bao Hoang’s agents boasted to undercover investigators about their contacts on both sides of the border and their involvement in moving rosewood, and more than 20 log trucks lined the company’s compound at a company anniversary in late 2022. Its logs cross from Ratanakiri and Mondulkiri, and its suppliers include T.S.M.W., Try Pheap, and Angkor Plywood.
“If that kind of documentation can itself be systematically manipulated, then the lack of independent oversight creates a significant blind spot for legality assurance systems worldwide,” Thomas Chung told Mongabay, with EIA’s forests campaign leader for timber adding that border authorities lean on paperwork wherever independent scrutiny is scarce.
A Vietnamese crew manager paints and numbers log ends at a Lao harvest site, work the Forest Protection Department is mandated to do, with one manager telling EIA that a thousand cubic metres is listed as six or seven hundred. (Photo Credit: © EIA)
Vietnam banned harvesting in its own natural forests and built an export industry on imported logs, the report says, and its legal system, tightened by decree in 2024, now requires importers to name the country of harvest and flag at-risk species in finished products. The checks run on documents issued in the country of harvest, and Cambodia and Laos have scored below the World Bank governance line that system uses as its risk trigger every year since 2016.
“The local people cut it illegally, and we buy from them,” Pham Ngoc Muoi, who runs Muoi Linh Hieu Company in Nghe An and ranks among the largest importers of Lao timber, told investigators. Every load carries a log list, a border fee of $1,800 a truck, and the $800 he charges for clearance.
Eight payments traders, brokers, and quota holders told EIA they make between the harvest quota and the Vietnamese border, from a $20 bribe on a cubic metre of quota to $50,000 for the export documents on a double trailer at Phin. (Graphic: Wood Central; Source: Environmental Investigation Agency, Manufactured Legality, June 2026)
Pyinkado is the dense red hardwood behind flooring, decking, and heavy construction across the region, sindora goes to furniture and flooring, and rosewood feeds the Chinese market for traditional hongmu furniture, the trade Global Witness priced when it named Cambodia’s rosewood cartels a decade ago.
Overseas buyers took $10.2 billion of wood and wood products out of Vietnam in the seven months to July, the United States $5.09 billion of it, China $1.535 billion, Japan $1.267 billion, and Australia $94.4 million. Furniture made up most of the $6.4 billion in finished products.
Kongchay Khunphasert, a Sekong quota holder originally from Vietnam, charges $18,000 a container for a full set of export papers, the report says, and lets Vietnamese crews harvest under his quota and ship from his factories. His son runs the logistics firm at the Dakta Ok and Nam Giang gate.
“When the wood arrives at the factory, there is quota,” Kong Norasing told investigators at Phin in Savannakhet, where the Lao operator claims 30 truckloads exported last year. Kong introduced the investigators to Vantha Bounvilay, a provincial trade official who assured them of approvals for any volume processed through the Laos Mixay factory, the same paperwork that Vo Thi Kim Loan sells in Salavan at $10,000 a truckload.
The four supply chains EIA traced into Vietnam, how the wood acquires its paperwork on each, and the fees traders and quota holders told investigators they pay, from $18,000 a container in Sekong to $50,000 a double trailer at Phin. (Graphic: Wood Central; Source: Environmental Investigation Agency, Manufactured Legality, June 2026)
Yellow balau and keruing logs for outdoor furniture were the first trade EIA documented, in 2008, when it counted 500,000 cubic metres a year crossing from Laos a year after Vientiane banned unprocessed exports. Buyers in Vietnam took 590,000 cubic metres of Cambodian logs and sawn wood in 2015, 800 per cent more than two years earlier.
Official shipments have since fallen to 4,139 from Laos and 459 from Cambodia last year, 5 to 9 per cent of Vietnam’s timber imports, and the agency finds the same networks behind the smaller flow.
Shipments of logs and sawn wood into Vietnam under HS codes 4403 and 4407 peaked at 6,318 from Laos and 1,779 from Cambodia in 2022 and fell to 4,139 and 459 last year, with 2,030 and 145 recorded to April. (Graphic: Wood Central; Source: EIA analysis of Panjiva shipment records)
An Mady Group, owned by a chamber of commerce deputy president and a ruling-party MP, holds 27,000 hectares of concessions inside Virachey National Park and set up a sawmill near the Vietnamese border in late 2024. A driver in a convoy of square rosewood logs told activists early last year that the trucks cross only at night because Vietnamese police bar log trucks by day, and the report says the company supplies Bao Hoang and has been documented inside Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary.
Khut Soeum’s 15-member volunteer patrol counted 283 planks on a loaded truck there last month, and rangers confiscated 50, in a sanctuary where joint teams opened 178 crime cases in the first four months of the year and arrested 13 people. Cambodia is not among the 21 APEC economies that pledged in Shenzhen last month to intensify the fight against illegal timber, and Vietnam is.
“Vietnam has been sucking up the forests of Laos and Cambodia for over 30 years,” Marcus Hardtke told Mongabay, with the activist, three decades in Cambodia and no part in the report, advising importers to treat Vietnamese timber as high risk.
EIA tells importers not to rely on the documents their suppliers hand them and to reconsider any supplier whose risks cannot be mitigated, and wants Hanoi to treat quota- and concession-linked supply from both neighbours as high risk. Bao Hoang has bought across those borders for 30 years, and the report records no substantive response from any party it named before publication.
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