At a total of around 1.35m m³, German sawmills exported roughly 7% more rough-sawn softwood lumber in the first quarter than they did a year earlier. Pro-visional figures from Destatis, the German statis-tics office, in Wiesbaden, show that in doing so 972,990 m³ were delivered to buyers within Europe, which equates to an increase of 5% against the year before and a 71.9% share of the total exports. Exports to buyers outside Europe amounted to 380,066 m³, roughly 15% more than in the first quarter of 2015. Their share of the total exports thus rose by around two percentage points to 28.1%.
Imports of rough-sawn softwood lumber were 3% higher than in the same period of last year at 868,489 m³ whereby those from Sweden rose by 3% to 162,547 m³ and those from Finland fell by 4% to 108,816 m³. Marked growth was recorded in imports from Russia and Belarus. At 113,972 m³, Russia was Germany’s second-biggest lumber supplier in the first quarter, which put it even ahead of Finland in terms of volume.