With all the consolidation that has been going on in the SE Asian panel manufacturing industry it is in a way refreshing to find a company which is small, wishes to remain small, and knows exactly where it wants its market position to be.
Such a company is Segamat Panel Boards (SPB) in Segamat, Johor, in the south of peninsular Malaysia.

Acquired at the end of September 2008 from the Hong Leong Group, Hume Fibreboard Sdn Bhd joined the existing mills of the Evergreen Group in Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia and became known as Evergreen Fibreboard (Nilai) Sdn Bhd.
Evergreen, headed by the dynamic J C Kuo, paid RM213m (US$59m) for the factory, which brings two MDF lines in Nilai (40km from Kuala Lumpur International Airport to the south of the capital city) to his growing family of mills.
The two production lines comprise a 10-daylight Siempelkamp hot press line, which went into production in 1992, and a Siempelkamp ContiRoll continuous press line which started up in 1996.

Mieco is part of the Bandar Raya Developments Bhd Group of Companies. It started up its first particleboard (or chipboard) line in 1976 and claims that, in the process, it became the first panel maker in Malaysia to utilise rubberwood as its raw material.
The company today has two particleboard factories, located in Gebeng and Kechau Tui, Pahang and these have a combined capacity of approximately 900,000m3 a year. The most recent of these lines is the one in Kechau Tui, near Kuala Lipis.
Mieco’s headquarters is on the 30th floor of an office building in the centre of Kuala Lumpur and it was there that I went to interview managing director Dato’ Yong Seng Yeow (the word Dato’ is equivalent to the title ‘Sir’ in the UK).

Founded in 1988 by Tan Sri Datuk Tiong Hiew King, Subur Tiasa Holdings began by making veneer and plywood. Over the years, the group diversified into logging, particleboard manufacture, sawn timber processing and finger-jointing. A few years ago, the company went into reforestation and oil palm plantations. Although Subur Tiasa Holdings Berhad is one of those operations started by Rimbunan Hijau in 1988, it has been a publicly-listed company in its own right since 1997.

It was back in 1996 that Mr Tenson Yoong built his first particleboard production line; a single-opening 2.5x22m Raute press with Schenck forming station. That line was intended to be the first of several wood processing operations to be built on the 132-acre site in Gemas and was thus the first stage of Mr Yoong's dream of an integrated rubberwood processing complex there. On November 1, 2006, stage two was realised with the first commercial production coming from the latest major investment, a 405,0000m³/year continuous particleboard production line from Dieffenbacher adjacent to the first, Raute, line. So far, these remain the only factories on the HeveaWood Industrial Park, so Mr Yoong has a little longer to go before he realises his overall 'dream'.

Mieco Chipboard is a name that is very well known in the Asian panel industry, both for raw particleboard (chipboard) production and for its extensive valueadding facilities, having launched its first production line in 1976.

I have good reason to remember my first visit to Robin Resources’ factory in Mentakab in Peninsula Malaysia, because it was my first visit to any mill in South East Asia.
That was back in September 1995 and the mill was as yet unfinished.
It was one of those projects funded by a complete newcomer to the panel industry, Dr Robin Loh, who was, and is, an entrepreneur with a wide range of investments in many industries.
He purchased the 57-acre greenfield site in Mentakab – nowadays about two hours’ drive north of Kuala Lumpur (about four hours in 1995 before the motorway was built!) – in 1994, and founded Robin Resources (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd.
The production line was a joint turnkey project for Bison and Dieffenbacher, both of Germany, and incorporated a Dieffenbacher CPS continuous press with a 27.8m x 8ft pressing zone.

The first article presented in WBPI about this Malaysian company appeared on page 12 of the October 1996 edition and bore the headline ‘Merbok: Making MDF in a hurry’.