There has been a dramatic expansion of pulp manufacturing capacity in the past five years, but because of a lack of competitively priced wood fibre in China, the two largest pulp companies there are importing chips at a prodigious rate.
Wood Resources International said the value of imported wood chips has increased from US$180m to US$1.3bn last year, but experts believe it is probably now closer to US$1.5bn.
Vietnam supplies more than half the total, followed by Indonesia, Thailand and Australia.
Despite this the average cost of imported wood chips declined by almost 6% in the past year.
