Construction and the processing of glass (tempering, hardening and cutting to size) formed the basis of Sichuan Guodong Construction Co Ltd’s business.

A company which has come through the devastation of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake that destroyed seven of its factories should be well-suited to meet a challenge.

August 8, 2010 was a very significant day for Mr Cai Weijin, chairman of the board of Hubei Boayuan Group Co Ltd and general manager of its Hubei Baoyuan Wood Industry Co Ltd Jingmen panel manufacturing complex.

In common with many other ‘traditional’ panel makers in China, as opposed to those who joined the industry from other backgrounds, Suichang Luyuan Wood Co Ltd started out making wet process fibreboard (hardboard), in Suichang County, in 1985.

Fujian Yongan Forestry (Group) Joint Stock Co Ltd was originally founded in 1994 as a timberland company, planting and selling trees in Fujian province. At that time, it was wholly owned by Yongan City government.

Having started out in 1997 as a producer of laminate flooring based on bought-in imported, and then domestically-produced, HDF, Chengdu Shengda Company built its first HDF manufacturing line in 2007, setting up a new subsidiary company, Sichuan Shengda Man Made Fibreboard Co Ltd, for the purpose.

Hebei Yingang Man Made Board Co Ltd built its first panel line in 1993 in Zhengding, Hebei province. It was a Chinese-made multi-opening line with a capacity of 15,000m3/year.

WoodMac China, FurniTek China and WoodBuild China were held concurrently at the Shanghai New International Expo Centre over four days at the end of February/beginning of March.

Local organiser of WoodMac China, International Exhibitions Ltd, says that demand in China for labour- and energy-saving technology and systems to reduce wastage of raw material has increased dramatically in the past year. A number of European-headquartered machinery manufacturers will be hoping to take advantage of those trends, alongside what is reported to be the largest number of Chinese machinery exhibitors ever.

The late-2008 boost to spending and consumption in China provided by massive spending on infrastructure and other labour- and material-intensive schemes was reflected in 2009 by a rapid acceleration in economic activity, particularly in the second half of the year and into 2010.

Shengda Forestry is a privately owned company founded in 1997 to produce laminate flooring. In fact, the company claims to have been the firstmanufacturer of this product in China; itsmajor competitor,Power Dekor, only imported laminated board and machined it in China at that time.

Baoshan Corporation, headquartered in Long menshan Town, near Chengdu in Sichuan province, has a 30-year history in metal working, mainly in copper and zinc, and in hydro-electric energy generation schemes.

This company began its life in panel production with a wetprocess hardboard production line in Chunan, Zhejiang Province, in 1980. The company was then known as Zhejiang Chunan Wood Based Panel Plant.

This company, which gained a listing on the Shanghai stock exchange in 2001, has seven subsidiaries, involved in glass (its first and currently its biggest business venture), food processing, strawboard manufacture and now MDF.
Sichuan Guodong Construction also has two laminating lines from Dieffenbacher, a Vits impregnation line for overlay papers and two Homag lines for making laminate flooring, all at the strawboard factory, which is located approximately 10km from the MDF/HDF line, both of which are in Shuangliu town, not far from Cheng Du city.
Construction of the new fibreboard line on its 700mu (47ha) site began in March 2004 and the six-storey office building was completed in October. The site cost around RMB50m (US$6m) and a second fibreboard line is planned once the first is running well and has established its market.
At the time of WBPI’s visit in early April, the factory buildings were not complete, as the final equipment installation was not due to be finished until the end of the month. The company hoped to produce the first panels in May.
The main part of the fibreboard line was supplied by Dieffenbacher, from forming to the book saw; of course including the CPS continuous press, which has an effective length of 40.3m and a width of nine feet.
Mr Yunquan Xiong, general manager for the MDF/HDF division of Sichuan Guodong Construction, said this gives the mill a capacity of 300,000m3 on an 8mm board basis. “We will be producing both MDF and HDF and we also want to make a low density board for wall panelling – around 400-500kg/m3,” said Mr Yunquan. “We are aiming for the domestic market and our production will represent around 10% of the consumption in Cheng Du as there are many, many furniture producers in this area.”
The company plans to set up its own raw material base and has plans for 100,000mu (around 6,670ha) of plantations and was in the process of purchasing land in April.
“In the meantime, we will use the existing raw material base in Cheng Du, which is pine and eucalyptus,” said Mr Yunquan.
“The plan is to produce 3, 4 and 5mm raw fibreboard for the construction and decoration markets initially,” said the general manager. “We already have the value adding facilities at our strawboard line, with spare capacity in the short-cycle lines.”
Mr Yunquan then added a surprising footnote: “We then intend to modify the line a little to enable us to produce cardboard. We have applied to the government for a patent to produce cardboard on this kind of line. There is no other line in the world producing cardboard using the dry process and Dieffenbacher has said that they believe it is possible.”
Many panel plants and other factories in China experience problems with the electrical power supply, particularly in the winter, but Mr Yunquan said that, with effect from March this year, the problems in the Cheng Du area had been resolved because more power stations had been built. However, the company does have an emergency diesel generator.
The MDF/HDF factory has an energy plant supplied by Vyncke of Belgium, which Mr Yunquan proudly stated was, at 65MW capacity, the biggest in China.
The mill was also destined to be self-sufficient in resin supply as it will have its own resin plant, supplied by a Chinese company.
“We will produce only E1 board and will also be able to produce E zero,” said the general manager.
Preparation of the wood raw material employs chippers supplied by Andritz of Austria, which also supplied the chip washing, screening and woodyard equipment. The logs are debarked before chipping.
The refiner is from Pallmann of Germany and is a 62in unit – again the biggest in China, according to Mr Yunquan.
GreCon supplied the thickness detection between pre-press and press and Imal supplied the magnetic metal detector.
A Holzma sawing system will cut the panels to the standard 4ft x 8ft size, but the factory does not plan to offer a full cut-tosize service, although it will cut laminate flooring blanks on demand for the flooring line at the strawboard factory.
So Sichuan Guodong Construction has added another 300,000m3 or so to Chinese MDF capacity. This comes at a time when many commentators are questioning the need for the capacity which already exists. But Mr Yunquan is not concerned in the least. “We think that in the next 10 years, MDF capacity will expand very fast, based on information we have. People who say there is too much capacity are only looking at furniture and decoration, whereas we want to go for the construction market with products such as wallboard and we think, in these areas, MDF will continue to have a big and increasing market.
“In China, suppliers of thicknesses under 3mm have sufficient orders. For MDF we have a phenomenon, with imported production lines being used for thin board and locally made lines being used for thicker board,” added Mr Yunquan. “In the beginning, imported and local lines produced the same material but, in recent years, there has been this split between thick and thin.”
In addition to its strawboard and this new fibreboard line, Sichuan Guodong also has a Bison particleboard line in Guangyuan, also in Sichuan province. This is a 50,000m3 a year single-opening line and, as the only line of its kind in south west China, Mr Yunquan says it has a good market.
The company is also considering buying a calender press line for the production of very thin MDF.
Then, maybe, there is cardboard...
“We are also negotiating with the government about increasing our particleboard capacity, because the government wants more particleboard,” added Mr Yunquan. “Our assets will rise to RMB5bn in the next three years and our group president, Wang Chunming, has done a lot of work to achieve this goal.

There are four factories producing MDF  in the Dong Zheng Group, with each having a different name according to where it is located.

Hubei Baoyuan Group  Co Ltd was established in 1970 as a state-owned coal mining company. Partially  privatised in 2000, the company diversified into panel production with its first MDF  line in 2002.

When its cooperation arrangement with a Chinese machinery manufacturing company came to an end, Siempelkamp  set up its own workshop  in Wuxi, two hours’ drive from Shanghai  in Jiangsu Province, opening its doors in July 2004.

Asmall, government-owned sawmill beside the Oujiang river in Lishui, Zhejiang Province, formed the foundation for the Lishui Oak company in the early 1980s.
In the middle of that decade, it turned its attention to the panel industry with the construction of a wet-process fibreboard (hardboard) line.
In 1988, changes were made to that line to turn it into a dry process fibreboard (MDF) facility, equipped with a Chinesemade multi-opening press.
A second MDF line, from Shanghai Wood Based Panel Machinery Co Ltd (SWBPMC), followed in the mid-90s.
“After two or three years, this line was running well; and the MDF industry was growing fast,” recalled the general manager of Lishui’s new continuous Dieffenbacher line, Mr Wang Guoshu. “Thus, in 1998, we started to build another four lines, two in Zhejiang Province and two in Fujian. These were again multi-opening lines from SWBPMC.
“In around 2000, we built another three multi-opening lines in Fujian Province and, in 2002, another similar line in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province.
“Then, in June 2002, we signed the contract with Dieffenbacher for our first continuous press line for MDF.”
The first board from this line was produced on August 5, 2003, the company having built a complete new factory on a 150,000m2 greenfield site on the outskirts of Lishui city in just over a year. This was in spite of the fact that a lot of rock had to be brought in, and piles driven, on this lowlying site close to the river.
However, this is not the latest line for the company; also in 2003, it started up another multi-opening line from SWBPMC, with locally made chipping equipment and an Andritz refiner. This time the line was located in Shanghai. The wood raw material for this line is waste wood from the greater Shanghai area and Mr Wang believes his company was the first to use such material to make MDF in China.
During this period of rapid development, the company also became privately owned by a group of investors in 1993, of which the principle shareholder is company chairman Mr Xu Meng Zhang.
The whole Lishui continuous line project was split into six contracts, with Dieffenbacher supplying everything from the dryer to the finishing line, GTS Energy of America the energy generation plant, Andritz the refiner, Steinemann the sander and Anthon the cut-to-size system. On-the line quality control and spark detection/ extinguishing systems were from GreCon.
In fact, at the time of my visit in early March, the GreCon system had stopped a fire the previous night, with the factory and line sustaining no damage.
Dieffenbacher also had the overall responsibility for coordinating all the plant suppliers for the line.
The 50,000m2 log yard holds the stock of raw material, which is about 60% Mason pine and 40% hardwood, including beech and eucalyptus among other species, all in log form from local plantations. “We do not use bought-in chips because we cannot control the quality,” explained Mr Wang.
Chipping was supplied by Andritz Oy of Finland which also designed the debarker, although it was manufactured in China.
The Schenkmann & Piel-designed dryer is followed by a sifter from the same division of Dieffenbacher. The GTS Energy system was the first such line in China and Mr Wang had experience of this system from West Pine’s mill in Canada.
Mr Wang designed and built the gluing system himself. As in so many other areas of the factory, he called on his eight years’ experience with PTP, beginning under the expert guidance of Norman Lau.
The Dieffenbacher forming station is the latest generation with a fibre distribution and classification system integrated into the main fibre stream to dissolve fibre knots and improve spreading accuracy. It is also claimed to reduce operating costs through lower exhaust air volumes and to give a faster response in terms of weight control with changing wood types. This mechanical head enables the production of boards down to 2mm thickness.
The company plans to install an equalising roller system on the former to calibrate the fibre mat prior to pre-pressing in the multi-nip belt pre-press, when time permits. This will then remove the need for scalping and the attendant suction which Mr Wang says removes the smaller fibres from the top surface of the mat, and not the bottom, leading to imbalance in the board and to fibre sticking to the press belt.
Meanwhile, measuring and scanning equipment in the forming line allows continuous monitoring of mat and fibre quality as it approaches the 23.2m, 17 frame, CPS continuous press. This includes a GreCon density analyser. That press is also the latest generation, with adjustable/flexible, high-speed infeed to cater for the fact that the majority of Lishui’s production is thin board.
“Dieffenbacher is a good supplier,” said Mr Wang. “They make modifications to their plant as required, very efficiently, according to experience of the lines in operation.” The press is designed to run at up to 1,000mm per second and Lishui already had it running at 950mm per second, six months after start-up. For four to five millimetre board, that equates to over 600m3 a day, according to Mr Wang.
The design capacity of the line was 150,000m3 but he said that he had already made his own modifications to the front end during construction to raise total capacity to 180,000m3 a year.
At the press infeed, there are traversing polishing belts to clean the Sandvik-supplied 2.7mm stainless steel belts of the press, top and bottom.
The spacious control room is equipped with conventional monitors and controls for the entire production line, with Dieffenbacher Proguide system, as well as CCTV monitoring. The quality control laboratory is equipped with GreCon measuring and analysing systems. Lishui Oak also has a Sandvik belt patching tool for repairs to the press belts.
After the star cooler, packs are handled by fork lift for transfer to intermediate storage, to the Steinemann six-head Satos sander and Anthon cut-to-size plant, and to the 10,000m2 storage area.
Currently, Lishui Oak only produces raw board, but the company does have its eye on value adding for the future. “We are discussing which market is best for value adding,” said Mr Wang. “We may go for furniture production or some form of value adding to the panel itself.”
Laminate flooring is not one of the value adding options being considered. “The price for laminate flooring is very poor and the quality is generally poor as many manufacturers are producing the board on multi opening lines,” said the general manager. “The price has fallen from around RMB3,000 (US$363.6) to around RMB2,000 per m3, but at 880kg/m3 density. It is not a product we would consider making. There are too many small manufacturers who do not care about the quality – some do not even use a wear-resistant overlay.”
So far, the company’s markets for its raw board have been domestic, mainly in Guangzhou, Fujian, Zhejiang, Shanghai and Jiangsu, but with some production also going to Beijing and Chengdu regions. It has no export business yet but is talking to potential customers in Japan and Malaysia.
“We are already producing to E0, E1 and E2 grades by modifications to the resin recipe, using urea formaldehyde and melamine urea formaldehyde resins, and we add more wax to produce a moisture-resistant grade,” said Mr Wang.
Asked whether Lishui Oak was considering adding another line to its tally of 11, Mr Wang said: “Not yet. We will increase our capacity in the future, but this line has only just started. When we are well-established, we will think about expansion.”

Nowhere has escaped the economic meltdown, but perhaps China has suffered less than most. While it has been savaged by losses in export markets, a still-solid domestic economy (supported by government stimulus) has moderated the negative impacts of global economic stress.
For China, the worst part of the recession probably came in the last quarter of 2008 and first quarter of 2009 but recovery will initially be slow, if only because exports will drag through 2009 and well into 2010.
This is expected despite the increase in tax rebates for exporters (which may simply help to cushion the thin profits of exporters rather than immediately be reflected in lower prices and higher volumes).
There is growing concern that the domestic economy could falter in 2010 without another bout of stimulus. Unlike North America and Europe, where the effects of stimulus programmes will be felt more in late 2009/first half of 2010, the Chinese government stimulus announced in November 2008 will largely impact in 2009.
It is not clear that China understands the need to fundamentally change its business model.
The increased VAT rebates to exporters will not enamour the Chinese to their trading partners! Neither does it reflect an understanding of the nature of current economic problems; any attempt to generate export-led growth is unlikely to bear much fruit in a global economy unwilling to increase its consumption of consumer goods.
However, it is understandable why the government reacted this way, given the acute pain throughout much of the export sector.
Clearly, more emphasis needs to be placed on stimulating the domestic economy in China (and in other developing countries such as Brazil). The significant commitment of new funds to help to improve China’s health delivery system is hopefully just the first downpayment in a series of policy changes that will improve the social security safety net in China. In turn, these improvements will underpin increased domestic consumption as savings rates fall in response to a greater feeling of personal security.

Gross domestic product (GDP)
This re-structuring of Chinese consumer behaviour will take time, but the thrust of these changes over the next several years will result in further increases in consumer spending on housing, furniture and other commodities utilising wood products. At CFPA we assume that 2009 will be the trough year for Chinese economic growth.
GDP growth is assumed to be close to 7% this year, down from 9% in 2008 and 11.9% in 2007. Growth is forecast to climb
moderately to 7.7% in 2010 and to continue to climb subsequently, albeit not to the heights scaled in 2006/7 (see Table 1).

Housing
Meanwhile, after slipping 3.5% in 2008, housing completion activity will likely also edge lower again in 2009, dropping another 3.4%. Recent reports of a rebound in housing activity in China tend to confuse an increase in home sales with the level of new residential construction and/or completions.
With a large inventory of unsold homes resulting from overbuilding in late 2007/early 2008, the housing market needs to work off that inventory in 2009 before construction activity picks up later in 2009 and in 2010.

Industrial Production
Industrial markets for wood products have sagged over the past 12 months, not only because of lost export business, but also the massive global inventory correction at all levels of production and distribution.
Growth in China’s industrial output dropped to 12.9% in 2008 from 18.4% the previous year. For 2009, CFPA estimates growth in total industrial output of around 7.5%, to be followed by 9.5% in 2010.

Furniture Production
Lastly, the all-important furniture sector experienced its first drop in output in over a decade in 2008. A 1.9% decline was not catastrophic, but following growth of over 20% in 2007, the 2008 outcome was a major setback for China’s panel producers.
Recent developments require a re-think of furniture industry investment strategies as future export growth will likely be slower than over the past decade and increased attention will need to be focused on developing domestic furniture markets.
For 2009, CFPA forecasts just 1% growth in furniture production (higher domestic demand more than offsetting further weakness in exports). But with strength in both the domestic and export sectors in 2010, CFPA projects a 6.4% increase in total
furniture production next year (Table 1).

Production and exports
Recently-released data from China’s State Forestry Administration indicate that panel production in China in 2008 totalled 94.1 million m3, a 6.4% increase over 2007.
Table 2 summarizes the key components of this production (plywood, blockboard, particleboard and fibreboard; the remaining 5.2 million m3 was all other types of panels).
Through the first half of 2008, production across the board was up year-on-year. However, weakness in the second half resulted in small drops for the whole year for both plywood and blockboard (down 0.6% and 1.4% respectively). In contrast, the ongoing growth in capacity in particleboard and fibreboard led to year-on-year production increases of 37.8% and 6.5%, respectively.
Plywood production continues to lead the product pack. At 35.41 million m3, it represented 38% of total output in China in 2008, though this was down from 40% in 2007.
Blockboard’s share also slipped between 2007 and 2008, from 15 to 14%.
Fiberboard’s share held at 31%, while particleboard’s jumped from 9 to 12% as particleboard production leapt a surprising 3.1 million m3 to 11.42 million m3 (Table 2).
In part, production weakness in 2008 was induced by direct losses in export markets. Chinese exports of all panel types fell by close to 18%, from 11.3 million m3 in 2007 to 9.3 million in 2008. Plywood continues to dominate Chinese panel exports, but at 6.75 million m3, was at its lowest level since 2005 (Table 3). This decline was more than that for production as domestic demand held up better than offshore. Chinese fibreboard exports have soared in recent years, but also proved vulnerable to the global slowdown in 2008 and dropped 17.5% to 2.08 million m3.

Forecasts
Given the economic outlook discussed earlier, it is no surprise that further declines in consumption, exports and production are projected for 2009 (Figure 1). These declines largely reflect weakness early in the year; improvement is likely in the second half, continuing into 2010. But despite this reversal, total wood panel production for the whole year is forecast to drop nearly 9% in 2009, led by double-digit declines in plywood and particleboard (see Table 2). Again, weakness in exports will lead the way. Given the data reported in the first five months of the year, CFPA projects a 35% drop in total panel exports, led by over 40% declines in fibreboard and particleboard volumes (see Table 3).
However, the improvement in domestic and export markets in the second half of 2009 will be reflected in the 2010 data. With total panel exports rebounding 24%, CFPA forecasts Chinese panel production in 2010 will jump nearly 7%. Nevertheless, 2010 production will continue to remain below 2008 levels. China’s panel industry will need to wait until 2011 before setting any new production records. Further moderate erosion in plywood’s share is also anticipated.

Conclusion
After a decade of frenetic growth throughout China’s panel industry, the consumption pattern since 2007 either represents a momentary break in the previous hectic pace or a new paradigm.
We lean toward the latter belief. Pressures on log supplies (eg Russian log export taxes), higher manufacturing costs, and excess capacity, have all squeezed profitability.
At the same time, growth in key construction and furniture end-use markets will be slower over the next decade than the last, if only because these markets have passed their juvenile growth period and are entering ‘middle-age’. But given the large size of the Chinese panel industry, while growth rates over the next decade will be low compared with recent history, the volumes produced and consumed will nevertheless increase
substantially.

This article was written by Bernard Fuller, Cambridge Forest Products Associates www.CambridgeForestProducts.com. Questions and comments are welcomed and should be sent to: Bernard.Fuller@CambridgeForestProducts.com.

Suifenhe is a far-flung outpost of the People’s Republic, hanging onto its Chinese nationality by a thread as it sits on the very border with Russia in the northeast province of Heilongjiang.
Even in the very last days of April, the evening temperature is hovering around zero centigrade and the trees and shrubs are still bare sticks in a parched, wintry landscape.
The first shoots of spring are not expected for another month and yesterday’s now dirty snowfall still lies beside the roads.
The drive from the nearest airport, Mudanjiang, a small facility with only a few flights a day, on a Sunday night is long and uncomfortable on a cracked and broken twisting concrete single carriageway road that winds through the mountains. It is 160km but feels like a lot more.
Three lives are lost tonight – wasted in a head-on collision just ahead of us an hour out of Mudanjiang as the frustration of the relatively narrow road and slow-moving vehicles presumably became too much for somebody.
On the return journey the next day, a motorcyclist lies dead in the road in a pool of blood as the traffic drives around him. I am told it is much worse in the winter months.
The journey is completed in the dark, but even so, the approach to Suifenhe gives a very strong clue as to why Dare chose this rather inhospitable-looking area for its latest mill.
I have never seen so much wood in China, ever. And I have travelled
extensively in this country of so many different scenes.
It is stacked beside the road, it is loaded on lorries in log form, it is piled high at sawmills beside the road, it is stacked in small sizes outside the poor dark brick cottages of the local people. I later discover that there are 460 wood processing plants here, of all sizes.
Clearly wood is Suifenhe’s gold and it mostly comes from close neighbour Russia; the border between the People’s Republic of China and the state of Russia is about 100m from the Holiday Inn in Suifenhe.
One is used to seeing many bilingual signs in English and Chinese everywhere in China, but here they are in Russian and Chinese most of the way from Mudanjiang.
The drive to the factory from the hotel the next morning is mainly over compacted mud, past more sawmills and other wood processing operations, until we arrive at the Dare Group’s latest continuous MDF/HDF production line, rearing up out of the surrounding countryside with its high cyclone towers.
Dare Global group has a total of eight panel production lines – four of them Siempelkamp ContiRoll continuous lines each with annual capacities of 200,000m3.
These Siempelkamp lines are located at: Danyang, Jiangsu Province (the first such line to be built by the group); Fuzhou, Jiangxi; Maoming, Guangdong; and here at Suifenhe in Heilongjiang Province.
There is also a Dieffenbacher CPS continuous line for thin HDF at Deqing in Guangdong Province. That has a capacity of 150,000m3/year and started production in 2008.
Dare also has two older multi-opening lines producing MDF – one in Jiangsu Province, the other in Anhui Province. Each can produce around 100,000m3 a year and each was supplied by Shanghai Wood Based Panel Machinery Co Ltd.
Dare Global also made one foray into particleboard, building another Siempelkamp ContiRoll line at Sanming, Fujian Province. This line has an annual capacity of 450,000m3.
The company’s activities in the wood products industry are broadly divided into four product groups: Panels; flooring; solid wood products; and furniture.
The flooring division produces three different types of product: Solid wood; multi-layer wood; and laminate flooring. The main flooring production activity is centred on Danyang in Jiangsu Province.
The furniture factories make both solid wood and MDF furniture, with three factories – in Danyang and in Fujian Province.
Dare also has a door making factory and another small unit making architectural wood trim.
The group uses three brand names: Dare Wood Group; Power Dekor (for laminate flooring); and Kangsu (for solid wood flooring).
The wood group in total has a turnover of seven billion yuan (US$1.03bn). The group also has other diverse interests outside wood, giving it a total turnover of more than RMB10bn.
“That first ContiRoll line in Danyang started production in 2003 and now, six years later, we have built this plant in northeast China,” said Suifenhe’s general manager Shen Dan, whom I first met when Danyang was under construction. “Danyang was the first continuous line for Dare and this is the first time that such a large company has built a panel manufacturing plant in this part of China.
“Danyang took around 14 or 15 months from start of construction to the first board. Suifenhe took 14 months and 20 days,” said Mr Shen.
The company is particularly proud of this achievement because the conditions here bear no comparison with Danyang much farther south. To give some idea, I left Beijing in temperatures in the mid to high 20s centigrade on Sunday afternoon to disembark from the plane in zero degrees two hours later.
In the Suifenhe winter, temperatures regularly fall into large minus figures and when the first board was produced in December 2008, it was minus 28oC. Perhaps Dare was lucky – some years it falls to minus 40oC.
Although the heart of the two lines is similar – Siempelkamp ContiRolls – other elements are different, as Mr Shen pointed out.
For instance, firstly, Danyang purchased wood preparation and refining equipment from Andritz and the energy plant from Vyncke of Belgium.
Suifenhe has chip dry cleaning and refining and dryer from Metso, while the energy plant was supplied by Chinese company Changzhou Union.
However, machinery sourcing was not the only difference between the two plants – the technology employed was also different.
In Danyang, chips are washed before refining but for Suifenhe, it was decided that dry cleaning would be cheaper and better; it is the first such plant in China. Anyway, chip washing in the winter is out of the question here.
Also the dryer is two-stage as opposed to the single-stage dryer employed in Danyang.
The Suifenhe line is also designed to produce both thin board and low-density board from its ContiRoll.
“The target of our Suifenhe mill at the moment is environmentally-friendly production of medium and high density board for the furniture industry,” said Mr Shen. “Danyang and the other Dare fibreboard lines are mainly producing board for flooring.
“There is a fundamental difference between Chinese MDF and foreign-made board for furniture production and that is the density. In China, people prefer 750kg/m3 or more but, according to my experience, foreigners prefer 650kg/m3 or less,” explained the general manager.
“As far as I am concerned, China will also realise the need for lower density board for furniture in time and so Dare Group is trying to use this line to produce lower density board for the first time in China. I think this concept, which now belongs to Dare, will in the future influence the whole Chinese wood products industry.”
Mr Shen went on to point out that most furniture board in China is produced on multi-opening lines and he feels that the quality and cost is a big problem for these lines.
“We urgently need to upgrade the quality and technology of furniture board manufacture in China,” he said.
“We feel that our group is competitive because we use the ContiRoll and of course we have some other ideas, too. A Siempelkamp four-feet-wide ContiRoll with an annual capacity of 100,000m3 I think would be the most economical way to produce furniture board. That is just my idea, though.”
The Suifenhe ContiRoll does not however follow this principle. It is 8ft 6in wide and 37.1m long.
“This line is not only for furniture board and the Dare group tends to invest in big lines,” explained Mr Shen.
“This line is designed for an annual capacity of 200,000m3 but I am sure that in future, if we build another line, it will be more like 150,000m3 or less due to pressure on wood resources. Personally, I think this is the way China will go in the future.”
Mr Shen went on to explain that there is another fundamental difference between the Suifenhe line and Danyang and that concerns the resources.
“Most of the wood we purchase here comes from Russian wood processors. In terms of quality I think China has very good wood resources, but in the south it is mostly faster-grown wood and I think the main difference between Chinese and foreign boards for furniture production is in the wood raw material and we are able to change that situation.
“Every year, this city imports around seven million cubic metres of logs and it processes three to four million cubic metres of raw wood. This is the most important reason for Dare being here – both the quantity and the quality of the wood.”
I raised with Mr Shen the question of Russian export taxes on logs, delayed earlier this year (WBPI Feb/March, p5).
“We have considered this [threat to supplies] but we expect cost in the coming years to be stable – far east Russia relies heavily on log exports for its living. I cannot deny that in coming years there may be limitations on wood supply from Russia as its economy grows, but there is also a local supply of good wood around Suifenhe itself.”
Dare only has a relatively small back-up chipper in Suifenhe and relies mainly on prepared chips from the surrounding wood processing industries.
Mr Shen’s fifth and final point concerning the significant differences between the Danyang operation and here concerns the market.
“We can take advantage of the area of this city and can export to Russia, Japan and South Korea, although our largest market is northern China – Dalian, Harbin and Shenyang.
Actually there is a sixth difference – the climate!” continued Mr Shen, smiling. “From December to April it is normally below 15oC at least and this does cause us a lot of difficulties – especially as the management is from the south!”
Mr Shen admitted that the Chinese market is currently out of balance, with supply exceeding demand.
“Because of this, China has to reconsider the whole market,” he said. “Maybe there needs to be some integration and the closing of plants with capacities below 30,000m3/year.
“But the situation in China is very complicated. It is a huge country and different areas have different situations. We expected more integration in 2005/6 but it didn’t happen. We still believe the Chinese panel industry has a bright future because, in the end, the market decides everything.”

In the early days of Shanghai Wood Based Panel Machinery’s (SWPM) existence, when it was founded by the China Forestry Bureau, the company made production lines for the manufacture of wet-process fibreboard (hardboard).
In the 1970s, the company became part of the Shanghai Electrical Co (SEC) and continued to produce hardboard lines but also added plywood production lines with cold press, hot press and glue blending.
The company later added the technology for particleboard production to its range, but perhaps the most significant development for the company was when it developed its first MDF line, in 1992.
SWPM went on to become the major supplier of multi-opening presses and complete lines for MDF production in China and to begin exporting to other parts of the world.
Then, in a move which surprised many in the global panel industry, the world’s number one panel producer, Kronospan, purchased a 70% shareholding in SWPM in October 2004, while SEC retained 30%, as it does today.
Kronospan made the purchase through its subsidiary Kontex of Hong Kong, set up for the purpose of forming the joint venture with Shanghai Mechanical and Electrical Industry Co Ltd, a subsidiary of SEC.
However, subsequent to my visit to SWPM in late April, major machinery manufacturer Dieffenbacher of Eppingen, Germany, announced that it had bought Kronospan’s majority shareholding in SWPM. This was announced on May 15, 2009.
As soon as it bought the company in 2004, Kronospan immediately introduced some efficiency measures and reduced staffing levels quite dramatically, although that had been a trend for some years already; fifteen years ago the company employed 1,200 people, whereas today the figure is less than 500.
The offices were the subject of a major refurbishment project in 2007, while in 2008 a new research and development (R&D) centre was opened adjacent to the main offices.
“With the help of Kronospan after their takeover, we upgraded our management systems,” said Li Jie, manager
of the international sales department
of SWPM.
“Then, under the technical support and supervision of Kronospan,
we launched our first ContiPlus continuous press, using the knowledge and
experience of a long-term user of
continuous presses.”
This press was installed in Kronospan’s Bucina DDD particleboard factory in Zvolen, Slovakia in 2007 (WBPI April/May 2009, p35).
The continuous press had been under development by SWPM since its preliminary designs were drawn up in 1999 and the first one, a 4ftx18m unit, was test-run in SWPM’s own works in 2005.
The Bucina press is 45.1m long and eight feet wide. SWPM delivered its first 4ft wide ContiPlus at the end of 2008, to a Kronospan plant in Strzelce in Poland. That press is 38m long.
The Anting factory is now making an 8ftx52m ContiPlus for particleboard production at another Kronospan factory in eastern Europe; the name was not revealed.
It is also working on orders from two Chinese customers for 4ft-wide presses. Global Jiahe Panel Board Industry Co Ltd of Xian in Shaanxi Province has ordered a 32m long press as its first panel production line. It was delivered in May, to produce particleboard during 2010.
Jinyang Wood Industry Co Ltd in Xinjiang Province has ordered a 38m ContiPlus and is an existing customer of SWPM for multi-opening press lines. This press will go out in November this year to produce MDF some time in 2011.
“Since the arrival of Kronospan we have also invested a lot in advanced machine tools for making state-of-the-art products and we have many new machining centres in our factory now, including a new milling machine for hot platens installed this year,” said Mr Li in April, before the Dieffenbacher takeover had been announced. “The investment since Kronospan bought into the company has been greater than for many years.”
The products of SWPM fall into five main categories: First are press lines from forming station to finishing section with the technology for the production of MDF, HDF, particleboard and OSB using the company’s latest product, the ContiPlus continuous press, in four or eight foot width; then there are the more traditional multi-opening press lines including all the technology for MDF, HDF and particleboard production with various sizes of press being offered, both in terms of number of openings and platen size.
Short-cycle press lines for board sizes of 4x8ft, 6x8ft, 6x12ft, 7x9ft and 7x14ft are also made at the factory in Anting.
The fourth category of products is press lines for other industries such as high pressure laminate production, printed circuit boards, rubber belts, etc.
Lastly we come to refiner systems. Refiners for fibre production for
MDF are offered in 36, 38, 42 and
44 inch diameters.
In all cases, design and assembly is carried out in the Anting factory but for big projects, some components are outsourced, such as electric motors.
“In general, we develop new products in a customer-oriented process,” explained Mr Li. “At the present time we are mainly upgrading the ContiPlus for better performance and lower manufacturing costs for us. We are currently importing a lot of components from Europe and we are now looking at manufacturing those inhouse.
“We also provide existing customers with technical support for their production, troubleshooting, and spare parts at competitive prices.
“We want our customers to have stable production, lower costs and increased sales and we are helping them to do that.”
Clearly the market for new machinery is difficult in the current economic climate, but SWPM claims to have 100% of the Chinese-made complete line projects placed in China in 2009.
“At the end of last year, some projects and orders were suspended but since the national government injected a lot of money into the economy, most of them are now back on,” said Mr Li.
So what about SWPM’s plans for
the future?
“In the short term, we hope to increase sales of the ContiPlus in both the domestic and export market and gain more project experience,” said Mr Li. “In the longer term, we want to become a leading player in the panel machinery market worldwide.”

In his report from Weihua’s newest factory in FengKai, Guangdong province, Mike Botting listed the nine lines owned by this rapidly expanding panel manufacturing group (see WBPI issue 3, 2009, p24). Those nine lines – three multi-opening and six continuous – give the company a total output capacity in the region of 1.5 million cubic metres of MDF/HDF in China.
The line that is the subject of this story is located in Jiuji Town, Xiangfan City, Nanzhang County, in Hubei province and was the third continuous press for the Weihua Group.
Hubei Weilibang Wood Working Corporation, a member of the Guangdong Weihua Corporation, is located on a new industrial site on former agricultural land and is one of only two factories there. It is about three to four hours’ drive from Wuhan, the nearest large city in Hubei province.
This Weihua group factory covers an area of around 400mu (27ha). After passing through the group’s signature entrance gate to the site (designed to represent trees on the one side and panels on the other in an abstract way and common to all Weihua sites), one approaches the impressive office building.
Inside is a large atrium with balconies surrounding it on all sides leading to offices on the upper two floors. This atrium also features a stone wall with waterfall feature with the water falling into a large fish pond. All very tranquil.
Construction of these offices, the apartments for the workers and the canteen/social building began in March 2007. The site also contains a ‘hotel’ block
for visiting engineers and customers as the drive from Wuhan is long and
rather tedious.
Weihua, in common with most Chinese panel makers, builds its offices and accommodation before the factory buildings, rather than using temporary buildings until after the line is running as is the practice in some other countries.
The contract for the machinery for the MDF/HDF production line was also placed in March 2007, with the main part of the line being awarded to Dieffenbacher of Eppingen, Germany.
Capacity of the line is around 150,000m3 a year and the main thickness produced is 4.75mm for customers who produce laminate flooring and doors.
I asked the vice general manager at Xiangfan why the company chose this location. He gave a two-pronged answer:
“Firstly we have access to a good wood raw material supply as there is a good supply in Hubei province and not many industries utilising it – there is only PTP Hubei’s MDF line, Baoyuan MDF and us” said Li Bao Ming.
“Secondly, we are close to Wuhan, which is a city with a good market for the trading of all wood products. Fifty percent of our production goes to Wuhan and 50% of that goes to two laminate flooring manufacturers there. In fact, one customer has just placed a contract for 5,000m3 a month.”
That all-important wood supply is made up of 40% pine, 20% poplar and 40% mixed wood species – all of it plantation-grown and apparently within an unusually small, 40km, radius.
“Weihua has its own 50,000mu (3,350ha) plantation in the local area,” said Mr Li. “The company supplies the seed to the farmers and buys the trees from them at the market price.”
As a group, Weihua has 650,000mu of plantations of fast-growing, high-yield forest in Guangdong province, here in Nanzhang County in Hubei province and in Handan City in Hebei province.
Waste wood supplies the fuel for the GTS Energy system and is supplemented with bought-in sawdust which is available locally very cheaply, according to Mr Li.
Chipping of the incoming wood is carried out by Pallmann machinery and all chips are produced on site, not bought in.
Pallmann, of Germany, also supplied the refiner, which is a 52in diameter unit.
Dieffenbacher supplied the equipment from the drying area to the finishing line, including a CPS continuous press that is 24.2m long and eight feet wide, with a Sandvik stainless steel endless belt.
This line was ordered at a time when all European machinery makers had very healthy order books and Dieffenbacher had a policy of making use of some of its manufacturing facilities outside its Eppingen headquarters, where its quality standards could be guaranteed. Hence the hot platens for the Xiangfan CPS press were made at Dieffenbacher North America Inc’s factory in Windsor, Ontario, Canada.
Like most Weihua factories, Xiangfan is equipped with an Anthon of Germany cut-to-size system and a Steinemann sander.
The sander was originally purchased as a six-head machine but by September 2008 Weihua had decided that it needed to be an eight-head and ordered an extra two heads from Switzerland. The enlarged sander was due to go into operation in June.
In common with all other nine Weihua lines, Xiangfan has its own resin making plant.
Inevitably, I asked Mr Li how his factory was coping with the economic downturn.
“In the current economic situation we are paying more attention to board quality than to output,” he said. “We want to produce a very good quality product and because our production only started last September, it takes time to learn and to train the people to increase the quality of the board. If we were to go for full-capacity production, maybe the quality would not be so good.”
For the higher level staff, Mr Li said that they came from other Weihua Group operations, bringing their production experience with them. For new staff, over 90% were sent to the company’s first CPS line in Qingyuan, Guangdong province, for a year for training. Xiangfan employs a total of 280 staff. Total investment in the Xiangfan project was RMB370m (US$54.3m).
Whilst each Weihua factory has someone responsible for its sales, overall sales policy is centrally directed from the group headquarters in Guangzhou.
“The whole Weihua Group pays attention to board quality and different factories supply different types of board to make a big product range and expand our customer base,” explained Cheng Da, sales manager at Xiangfan.
“The average price of the board has reduced by roughly RMB400/m3 (US$59) between August 2008 and now – from RMB2200 to RMB1800 – maybe less today,” said Mr Cheng in late April.
Weihua has considered diversification from its MDF/HDF product range and had in fact drawn up plans for the group’s first blockboard line to be built on the Xiangfan site. However, the economic situation has caused the company to rethink those plans and to put the development on hold.

The Weihua group is just about to start up its ninth fibreboard line, further strengthening its position as one of the largest-capacity manufacturers in China. Mike Botting visited the construction site in April to bring the first of his reports

A major UK cabinet door producer, BLP, has set up a factory in China to produce the same high-end furniture components that it makes in the UK, but at lower cost. WBPI visited the company’s factory in Suzhou, near Shanghai. It has become increasingly common in recent years for European and North American furniture manufacturers to move their production base to China in order to save on production costs, largely through cheaper labour rates. The furniture which most people probably associate with the ‘Made in China’ label is likely to come flat-packed in cardboard boxes for self-assembly and to be at the lower, economy, end of the furniture market, where ‘quality’ comes second.

The company formerly known as Hebei Yingang Man Made Board Co Ltd is now known as China National Salt Industry Yingang Artificial Slab Ltd but there is much more than a change of name to report about this fast-growing enterprise. Hebei Salt Company and Zhending County Changshan Plastic Products factory formed a joint venture to develop the panel manufacturing interests of Hebei Yingang Man Made Board Co Ltd and today the company occupies a 65.8 acre site with factories covering 77,929m2 and representing RMB820m (US$120m) in fixed assets. The company employs 680 staff at Zhengding in Hebei province.

Established in 1982, the Zhejiang Luyuan Group has a total of 11 production lines around China and a combined capacity of around one million cubic metres. We visit the company’s most recently completed project, in Yangdong. Zhejiang Luyuan Group built its first panel production line in 1984, in Suichang, Zhejiang province in the east of China. It was a wet-process hardboard line with a capacity of 10,000m3 /year. In 1995 the company moved into dry-process fibreboard, or MDF, buying its first, seven-opening, press line from Shanghai Wood Based Panel Machinery Co Ltd (SWPM). This line had an annual capacity of 30,000m3 and replaced that original hardboard line. Fast forward to 2003 and we find the group building its first, imported, continuous press line from Siempelkamp of Germany.

Li Ren Wood Group has a relatively long history in wood based panels and owns several companies trading under different names. In the first of his reports for Part ll of our Focus, Mike Botting visits its latest factory, Senlan Wood Co in Fujian province.Li Ren was originally a wet process fibreboard producer with a capacity of 10,000m3/year at its factory in Lishui, Zhejiang province. In 1994 the company switched to MDF production with a 30,000m3/year Chinese-made line, also at Lishui. This was achieved by modifying the original wet process line. In 1995, another MDF line was installed at that site, again with a capacity of 30,000m3 and utilising Chinese-manufactured equipment.

Shijiazhuang may be almost unpronounceable to a westerner, but it is the capital city of Hebei province and is located three hours’ drive south west of Beijing.
Hebei Yingyang Man-Made Board Co Ltd started life in the panel industry in 1993 with a particleboard line made by Chinese company Sichuan Donghue Machine Co. It has a 12-daylight, 4ft x 8ft multi-opening press.
This line originally had a tiny capacity of 15,000m3 a year but has since been upgraded to 50,000m3.
The company’s second line, for the production of MDF, came from the same supplier, and had the same size press. It produced its first board in 1994. The capacity of this line was also subsequently increased, this time to 40,000m3 a year.
Donghue Machine Co closed down soon after Hebei Yingyang bought this line.
The company’s third line, built in 1998, was also for MDF and was this time supplied by  Shanghai Wood Based Panel Machinery Co Ltd (SWBPMC, now known as SWPM). It had the first 15-daylight press in China, with dimensions of 4ft x 16ft. The original capacity was 50,000m3 a year but this has since been increased to 100,000m3.
“During 1994, many factories were producing MDF in China and there was felt to be enough capacity,” said general manager Fan Hua Zhi. “But after I bought this first 15-daylight press, SWBPM gained a good market for this larger capacity press and sold many more.”
Next came the decision to buy a continuous line. “We bought this line because China was getting stronger and the people’s standard of life was improving and there was demand for a good quality board, so we decided to buy an imported line,” explained Mr Fan.
The whole production line was supplied by Dieffenbacher and it produced its first board in December last year.
A new building was erected on the 450mu (30ha) site in Zhengding, near Shijiazhuang, to accommodate the new line as there was plenty of space available on the site. The property also houses Mr Fan’s wife’s business. This involves making woven plastic sacks, using a mixture of recycled plastic and plastic pellets from an outside supplier which is all melted down in the factory. That business alone employs 600 workers in addition to the 1,300 employed on the panel lines, 70 of whom work on the continuous MDF line.
Construction of the new MDF building commenced in October 2003 and the first board came off the line in September 2004 – another rapid project completion which is common in China, it seems.
Raw material for the MDF production is a mixture of bought-in chips, shavings and sawdust from furniture and woodworking companies, and logs. It also includes  highquality shavings which come from the production of round, pointed wooden poles by another local company and which are delivered by a fleet of three-wheeled trucks.
The logs are a mixture of 50% softwood and 50% mixed hardwood, mainly poplar.
The Dieffenbacher CPS continuous press is 23.2m x 8ft and has a design capacity of 130,000m3.
“At present we can produce up to 150,000m3 since we started five months ago, and I hope to reach 200,000m3 by this May,” said Mr Fan in early April.
The CPS line is used to make 1.3mm to 3mm thickness MDF, while the older  multidaylight line is used to produce thicker boards, although 5mm and 6mm boards are sometimes made on the continuous line.
Main markets for the thin board are for furniture, wall panelling, doorskins and similar end-uses, explained the general manager, who is also the owner of the company and was formerly a farmer.
Although Dieffenbacher was responsible for the supply of the complete plant, Mr Fan said that his staff put the line together themselves, under the German supplier company’s supervision and equipped with its drawings.
“Dieffenbacher was responsible for supervision, but we built the line ourselves and made some non-standard parts ourselves. Most factories invite specialist contractors in but we did it ourselves.We saved a lot of money that way and this was also a first for China,” said Mr Fan proudly.
For example, said Mr Fan, air grading, forming and pressing and all electrical controls were Dieffenbacher responsibilities, while panel handling was built by a local company known to Hebei Yingyang, again to Dieffenbacher’s drawings. The extraction system and silos were made by Mr Fang’s staff.
The chipper was a “special one” from a Chinese manufacturer, but the refiner was supplied by German company Pallmann and is a 54in unit. Because he uses small diameter roundwood, Mr Fang said he does not employ a debarker.
Glue preparation is from Dieffenbacher. Italian company Imal supplied thickness and blow detection equipment, while board finishing employs a six-head sander from another Italian manufacturer, Imeas.
Yingyang has two Chinese-made shortcycle lines on site, but these are only used to produce panels to customers’ order. Mr Fan explained that the local market for low-pressure melamine faced panels is not very good.
Mr Fan’s next project/dream is to build a continuous particleboard line which he said he would like to buy from Dieffenbacher again.
Funding for this project is, however, not easy and is to come, in part at least, from the closure, dismantling and sale of the SWBPMC multi-opening MDF line to a company in Henan province. The line was already dismantled and awaiting shipment in April this year.
Mr Fan is also seeking a partner to help him with establishing this continuous  particleboard line as funding it alone so soon after the MDF line continues to be a problem for him at this time.
“Our aim is to use recycled wood collected from farmers in the region, mainly from the demolition of old houses, to supply the raw material for the particleboard line,” said Mr Fan. “We are already using such material for our existing line.”
I asked Mr Fan why he was so keen to build a continuous particleboard line and he said that the local market needs a good quality particleboard and has suitable waste to use as raw material, thus enabling him to produce the panels more cheaply than with fresh wood.

With MDF/HDF continuous production lines already in production in Danyang in Jiangsu province and Fuzhou in Fujian province, Dare Global started up its third Siempelkamp-supplied line on the outskirts of Maoming city in Guangdong province in December last year.
The company’s fourth project, a 500,000m3 a year particleboard line in Sanming in Fujian province, is due to begin production at the end of this year.
The first MDF/HDF line, in Danyang, started production in July 2003 so the company  has made a rapid and strong entry into the panel business in the last few years. That is true too of the  rapid start-to-finish times for construction of all three lines – for example, civil construction work for the Maoming line began on December 23, 2003; first board was produced on December 8, 2004.
So why did Dare select this location for its third mill? “We go where the raw material is available and Guangdong also offered a good market for MDF and HDF,” said Li Zhengliang, general manager and director responsible for the Maoming factory. “We also wanted a location where there were no other large MDF mills too close to us.”
That raw material is 70% pine at present, but in the long-term the mill will need  eucalyptus as well. “There are pine plantations in this area, but it is a slow-growth timber,” explained Mr Li. “We plan to start our own plantations when we can find some land but it is a question of whether the farmers will sell that land to us. At the moment, they prefer to grow the trees themselves – they regard the land as their ‘green bank’ and if they plant eucalyptus they can get their investment back in four years with little work.
However, we prefer to have control over at least part of our raw material supply.”
The company employs 20 travelling buyers to seek out and buy wood for the mill.
And nothing is wasted as some sawmill waste is used to make pallets.
The other major raw material, resin, is made in Dare Global’s own resin plant on the Maoming site.
At present, design capacity of the mill stands at 200,000m3, but on an 8mm thick basis, Mr Li believes the line will achieve 280,000m3 – and he is speaking from experience as both his company’s other lines are running comfortably above design capacity.
“This line was intended to make thin board but we have demand from different markets for all thicknesses of board and that is a problem for me,” said Mr Li. “Our main market is Guangdong province, but we also export to the Middle East and the US; both MDF and HDF for flooring. In fact, the group just received an order for 10,000m3 a month for export, and although it is not finally decided, the whole order will probably be supplied from this mill.”
That final decision rests on factors such as raw material supply, transportation costs and sea freight, he explained. “Such a big order must have guaranteed quality, quantity and on-time delivery as well as getting the costs right for both board and logistics.”
While the equipment at Maoming is essentially the same as that installed at Dare l in Danyang, this mill is set up to supply a different market in terms of panel sizes.
Hence a more sophisticated book saw line by Siempelkamp Handling Services is employed here. “We currently have 12 different cut sizes according to customer  requirements and, while we can make multiple cuts across the width of the board, we only have two saw blades to cut the length at the moment,” said Mr Li. “Thus we are discussing fitting a third blade, then we can cut anything because the market is now asking for all kinds of cut sizes: our orders are calling for special sizes, such as for blades for ceiling fans for hotels and restaurants.
“More and more products are using MDF and, as the price of steel increases, some products are being switched to MDF.”
Only raw board is produced at Maoming as the strategy of the Dare Wood Group is to set up dedicated lamination plants near the cities where the market is to be found, he explained. The main production is in E1 grade board with some E2 for laminate flooring where the board is encapsulated, but Mr Li hopes to produce E0 in the future.
I asked him if any further lines are planned on this large 600mu (40ha) site.
“It depends on the wood raw material supply and the market of course, but we do have  space available for another line here,” said Mr Li. “But at the moment, I think further MDF production in China is unlikely because by 2005/6, all the new big-capacity lines will be in full operation and that will mean a lot of capacity on the market, so we will have to wait and see what the result of that is. Also, you never know – the market can change a lot.
“In the last two or three years, a lot of big-capacity lines have started up but most of them are not yet running at full capacity and it will make a big difference when they are. It means the wood raw material price has increased a lot and margins are getting less and less – especially here in the south. The north is not quite so bad because there are not so many big lines there – Beijing Sinhua [Krono group] is the largest.
“Maybe in three to five years things will be more stable and more farmers will have planted trees, it is very difficult to say.”
There is much talk of anticipated growth in particleboard production in China but Mr Li is not so sure: “The market price is always much lower than for MDF and the most important thing for particleboard is that the surface quality should be good. It is also less demanding on raw material [wood] in terms of quantity for a lower density product, and wood quality, and there is a big demand for furniture in China so particleboard should have a good market. The main problem is surface quality and screw holding characteristics.
“Particleboard in China today is generally of such poor quality that people don’t like it. It would need a lot of sales effort even if you did make a high-quality particleboard and there is also the issue of edge-moulding [compared with MDF].”

It was 10 years ago that Asia Dekor saw the market opportunities presented by the new wonder product, laminate flooring. It built its first factory to laminate bought-in HDF boards in the city of Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, in 1995, with a capacity of five million m2 of laminate flooring.
The company then went on to start up a second line in 2000 with twice the capacity of the first, giving Asia Dekor a total annual output of 15 million m2.
Both lines are equipped with Homag sawing and tongue-and-groove equipment and with Dieffenbacher short-cycle presses.
The brand name for Asia Dekor’s laminate flooring is Power Dekor and its symbol is an elephant. The company has advertised extensively in China to ensure that both name and symbol are well recognised by consumers as representing a high-quality, powerful product. Today, that brand name is also shared by another Chinese producer, Dare Global, in a joint venture.
The next logical step for Asia Dekor was to secure the supply of HDF to guarantee the future success of the company and that is exactly what it did.
On July 23, 2004, the first HDF panel rolled off the company’s production line in Heyuan, also in Guangdong province.
We visited the site of this factory in March 2004 while it was still in the final stages of construction and this seems to have become something of a habit between WBPI and this company, as you will see.
The Heyuan factory has a Dieffenbacher CPS continuous press with Andritz refiner and Vyncke energy plant and turns out at least 200,000m3 a year of HDF and MDF. The HDF is of course used for its own laminate flooring production, but also finds a market in gift box manufacture, which employs 2.7, 2.8 and 3.0mm board.
The latest project for this rapidly growing company is a continuous particleboard line currently under construction in Huizhou in Guangdong province. Cue for another WBPI visit, then.
Asia Dekor has purchased a large area of land outside the city beside the Dongjiang River to construct its new factory and at the time of our visit, the frame of the main production hall was under construction and the foundations for the Dieffenbacher CPS press and the two chippers were being laid. Production is to start at the end of this year.
The planned capacity of this line is the same as the company’s MDF line – 200,000m3 a year.
Perhaps this is one of the first of the many anticipated new mills for particleboard in China which have been talked about for some time; general manager of the Huizhou plant, Mr Zhang Jian Yan, seems confident of demand for the mill’s anticipated production.
“We are building particleboard now because it is more profitable in the Chinese market [than MDF] and is production that is missing from that market,” he says. “There is currently very little production in China, it is nearly all produced on Chinesemade machines and the quality is poor. The particleboard price in China is also rising.”
The target market for Asia Dekor is the furniture manufacturing industry and that is developing rapidly in China.
“There is more furniture being exported from China and with the value of the euro rising daily against the Yuan, China cannot afford to import particleboard from Europe; and the price of the board in Europe is also rising,” says Mr Zhang. “There are also more foreign-owned furniture factories in the country who want to buy their particleboard in China, while demand on the domestic market is increasing too.
“I have visited two US-owned furniture factories in Shanghai which only use real wood veneer and they want particleboard as the base panel. Every furniture factory that wants to export its production needs particleboard.” Mr Zhang also suggested that there was an environmental angle to consider, since particleboard can be recycled.
That seems to answer the question “why now?” The next question is “Why here?” “The biggest furniture export region in China is in the south, with the main centres being in Guangdong province,” says the general manager. “In 2003, more than RMB24bn (US$2.9bn) of furniture was exported from here.”
The three main furniture producing cities in the province are Shenzhen, Donguan and Guangzhou. “We are well-positioned to supply all three,” says Mr Zhang confidently.
This also has some bearing on raw material. As Mr Zhang points out, furniture factories produce waste and this can be used as raw material for particleboard production.
However, that is for the future – maybe two or three years down the line. In the meantime, there is apparently no shortage of wood in Guangdong province, according to Mr Zhang who has worked extensively in the panel industry in China.
“We have carried out a market investigation and there are enough suppliers in this region and a lot of forest here, plus we have our own plantations and forestry company. We will plant 80,000mu this year ourselves  and the government is strongly supporting forestry in this country.”
The design and layout of the new particleboard line is the responsibility of German complete-line supplier Dieffenbacher. The front-end package has been sub-contracted to Pallmann of Germany, but using a locally made chipper.
Dieffenbacher is supplying forming, pressing, cooling, dryer, panel handling and glue preparation from its own resources. The energy plant will be from Vyncke of Belgium. Sawing is by Anthon of Germany and the factory aims to produce a full range of cut-to-size panels to customer order.
The area of the Huizhou site is around 218,000m2 in total and was mostly covered with lakes for fish farming before Asia Dekor arrived. Thus a lot of infilling has had to be done, shifting earth and stone from a hill on the other side of the main road which runs through the site.
Civil engineering works started on November 28, 2004 and most construction work was to finish around the end of June, ready for machinery to be installed in July.
Production will be mainly of thin board because there is very little currently available in China. Thus the main thickness will be 6mm for doorskins and packaging, but Asia Dekor will also produce 9, 12, 15, 18 and 24mm for furniture manufacturers.
“We will also have some downstream production here with melamine facing, but we have not made a final decision on that yet,” said Mr Zhang. Asia Dekor owns another area of land adjacent to its temporary offices and will eventually build a short cycle press line factory there to supplement that which it already has in Shenzhen.
The river running beside the site will provide some transport of wood raw material, when the water level is high enough – generally in the typhoon season in the summer.
An area of the site is set aside for the Asia Dekor Institute for training staff from all the company’s factories, as well as customers and suppliers. The company does not  anticipate any problem in finding suitable staff to train. Another building will provide accommodation for the expected 290 workers.
Also planned is an office block to replace the temporary accommodation the company currently occupies.
Asia Dekor’s factory is only one part of a large industrial zone taking shape at Huizhou for furniture production and a meeting was to be held between the local government and the company, in May, to finalise plans for this development.

Guangdong Weihua Holding Co Ltd is a privately-owned company, founded in 1992 and today has 12 member companies engaged in various businesses, including civil engineering, estate development, agricultural research, urban water supply, and copper foil panels, as well as the manufacture of MDF and HDF panels and furniture manufacture and wholesaling. The group employs some 3,500 people in total.
Weihua has three MDF lines currently running and another two well on the way, as well as laminating facilities and some furniture production.
The company’s first panel mill was an MDF line which produced its first board in 1997 in Meizhou City, Guangdong province. The factory is equipped with machinery from Shanghai Wood Based Panel Machinery Co Ltd (SWPM) and has an annual capacity of around 70,000m3. The press is a nine-daylight unit with a platen size of 4ft x 16ft.
Line two was built in Guangzhou city in 2001 and was another multi-opening press line from SWPM. This press was bigger than the first, having 15 daylights but still the same 4ft x 16ft platen size. It has the capacity to produce 120,000m3 of MDF.
With its third line,Weihua took a different approach and went for an imported line for the first time.With the exception of raw material preparation, the contract was awarded to Dieffenbacher as a turnkey project. The continuous CPS press is 28.5m long and has a maximum width of 9ft, giving the line a capacity of 200,000m3. Chipping and refining is by Andritz.
Located in Qingyuan, a city famous for its connections with the building and construction and the ceramics industries, it is the latest line to come on stream for the company, producing its first board in June 2004. Construction of the factory had begun in February 2003. It produces MDF and HDF for the southern China market, for furniture, flooring and decoration.
Line four is currently under construction in Taishan City in the west of Guangdong province. This will again employ a Dieffenbacher CPS continuous press, but will have a smaller capacity of 120,000m3, reflecting the lower availability of wood supply in that area. It is planned to produce the first board from this line in early 2006.
The fifth line will be in Yanchung City, near Maoming, again in Guangdong, with foundations planned for October this year and first board in April 2006. Maoming is also home to one of Dare Global’s four MDF lines. 
For this line,Weihua is reverting to discontinuous pressing technology and has awarded the contract to SWPM for a 12- daylight press with a capacity of 150,000m3. Refining will be by Andritz.
Mr Xie Yue Wei, vice general manager for all the company’s MDF lines and a man with considerable experience in the industry, cited two reasons for this.
Firstly he perceives a market for thicker board – particularly 20mm – in the Guangdong furniture industry and feels that a multi-opening press is better suited to this than a continuous press would be.
Secondly, he felt it was time to support the Chinese manufacturers after such a long run of success for the European ones.
Returning to the latest situation, our visit this time was to the Qingyuan factory, which is impressive, located on a site covering 630mu (42ha), together with a furniture factory which has a Chinese-made shortcycle press capable of turning out a million m2 of laminated board, for its own use and for sale to the general market. The furniture line can produce half a million pieces of panel-based cabinet furniture per year.
Another area of the site is set aside for the construction of a painting line for MDF which is due to be built in the future.
“Our intention is to have the biggest market in Guangdong because we have the  confidence and because we have the [raw] materials and the technology and we have built good relationships with our customers,” said Mr Xie, who added that there is a market for 20 million panels a year in that province.
“Our company is an important one for the government of Guangdong province to help, because we have brought industry and employment here.”
The wood supply for the new Qingyuan plant and for all the company’s other factories, comes from its own plantations and, currently, from local farmers, although Mr Xie said that in future maybe it would all come from Weihua’s own plantations.
“Each factory has its own forestry company. If you want to build an MDF line, you must first plant the trees and this company already began planting trees 14 years ago in Guangdong province.We have a total of 1.2 million mu (80,000ha) of plantations.”
Unusually, the Qingyuan factory uses some bamboo in its raw material for MDF/HDF and finds it to be a suitable component of the furnish.
The impressive office building has an enormous marble-floored open atrium set with chairs and tables for customers to sit in comfort. The offices are arranged on three floors around this atrium, with balconies running around three sides.
Behind the offices is the company ‘hotel’ in several blocks offering accommodation for customers and suppliers who wish to stay overnight. Beyond this is accommodation for some of the staff, of which 310 are employed in the production of MDF.
Weilibang is the brand name for all the company’s products, including Weilibang Fancy Veneer.
The bamboo and eucalyptus are chipped by Andritz machinery and there is a 54in Andritz refiner.
The Vyncke energy plant is fired by bark, dust and waste from production, supplemented with rice husk from this strong ricegrowing province.
Gluing and the whole forming and press line were supplied by Dieffenbacher. Thickness measurement and blister detection is by GreCon and panel handling is by Kontra. The factory has its own resin manufacturing plant on site. Finishing of the panels is done by a Steinemann six-head sander and Anthon sawing system.

If the name Robina sounds familiar to readers, it is probably because we reported on the Robin Resources MDF and laminate flooring operations in Mentakab, Malaysia.
Founder Robin Loh is a dynamic entrepreneur with interests in shipbuilding, hotels, the construction of a city in Australia, and the electricity supply industry, as well as the panel business. He also studied for and gained a Phd in political science at the age of 66.
Dr Loh entered the panel business in 1995, when the Mentakab factory produced its first board; that factory has gone on to produce its own-brand Robina Flooring, together with other value-added products.
The joint venture company in China, Robina Ltd, was set up in mid-July 2001 between Robin Loh and Yichun Forestry Management Co Ltd, in which Robina holds 70% and Yichun Forestry 30%.
The factory, at Yichun in Jiangxi province, was in fact originally constructed by Yichun Forestry Management Co Ltd, a corporation of the People’s Republic of China and therefore state-owned. Construction began in 1998, with production of MDF commencing in 2000.
That first line was supplied by Siempelkamp and employed a 12-daylight 4ft x 16ft multi-opening press. It had a design capacity of 54,000m3 a year, based on 8mm HDF board for sale to the laminate flooring market.
These days, the line is producing thicker panels for the furniture market and thus the capacity is greater, with 94,000m3 being produced in 2004, of which 18,000m3 was in the form of HDF for flooring and the balance MDF for furniture.
Since the beginning, the factory has been under the management of Mr Xia Jing Di, who is today the director general manager of the Robina Yichun operation.
“The purpose of the joint venture was to build a second line and utilise line one and local resources to the full,” said Ms Doris Chou, foreign representative and financial controller of Robina.
Yichun Forestry originally entered into a joint venture with panel producer Homanit of Germany and Mr Xia and Homanit managers visited a number of panel making factories worldwide to look at various continuous press lines. That joint venture ended after about a year and Robina ‘took over’ as the new partner.
The availability of wood supply was the prime reason for the original factory being built in Yichun, with pine plantations planted by farmers in a 200km radius supplying a good quality raw material for fibreboard production. In fact, explained Ms Chou, Jiangxi is the number two province for forestry in China, behind Fujian.
“We started our own plantation in 2000 and have doubled the area every year,” said Ms Chou. “We have planted 120,000mu [8,000ha] so far and we hope that in five to eight years, we will be selfsufficient in wood raw material.”
The company is planting pine and poplar and testing other fast-growing species which will grow at its plantations, 300m above sea level where snow is common.
The supplier chosen for the second line at Yichun was Metso Panelboard and the contract was signed in August 2003, with the down-payment being made that October. Construction work began in April 2004.
“I felt that Metso was the only potential supplier able to offer the complete line from log to packing, including the refiner, energy plant and panel handling as one company – I saw that as the strength of the company,” said Mr Xia, speaking through Ms Chou as interpreter. “We were also looking for a line with the highest performance, and the most cost-effective solution.
“At first, I had my doubts about the [former] Küsters press’s reputation but I changed my opinion after visiting a lot of Küsters lines overseas which were producing well. The press has also had a lot of modification under Metso and I felt the most important of these was the cooling zone. I think it is very important to the quality of the final boards.”
Robina’s is in fact the first of the Metso re-designed Contipresses in China, said Mr Xia. The second one will be for Fujian Furen for particleboard. He added that that company was one of the earliest entrants to MDF in China, with a Washington Iron Works multi-daylight press, followed by a Küsters press, also for MDF and now the order for the particleboard line.
Start-up of the line was originally planned for April this year, but abnormally bad weather conditions, with torrential rain and snow since December 2004, delayed progress. At the time of WBPI’s visit in April, the site was still suffering from a thick layer of sticky mud making outdoor construction work more difficult, and it was hoped that the first board would be produced the following month, but it was more likely to be in June.
The new line has a designed capacity of 200,000m3 a year from its 33.8m x 8ft 6in Contipress. The width is in fact adjustable from 6ft 6in to 8ft 6in.
Production is intended to be mainly thin board from 2mm upwards, although the line is designed for thicknesses up to 40mm. Line one will then be reserved for 12mm and thicker.
The Yichun factory has had its own resin plant on site since the first line was built and it has now built a brand new formaldehyde plant to serve both lines one and two. The plant supplier is a Chinese company based in Wuxi, near Shanghai, which also supplied the Kronosinhua Beijing factory and Kronoshuangfeng in Danyang in Jiangsu province.
The log yard and chip yard are both fully concreted and a new debarking and chipping line will serve both lines one and two, with a Pallmann drum chipper.
The refiner for line one was supplied by Andritz Sprout Bauer and is a 44in unit.
CMC Texpan forming is followed by an Elmed metal detector, and a mat damping unit after the pre-press. A travelling crosscut saw cuts the mat to length for the multi-opening press.
The control room has windows to the front for the production line and windows to the rear looking onto the refiner room.
After the star cooler, board edges are trimmed by a hogger, with the trimmings going for fuel. Stacks of boards are then transported by forklift to the warehouse.
After conditioning, sanding is carried out using an Imeas six-head sander.
Line two is in a new building across the road from line one on land purchased specifically for this purpose – and the construction of a new doorskin line in due course. The total area of the Yichun site is 600mu (40ha).
For line two, all major equipment was supplied by Metso Panelboard, including the drum debarker, supplied in six rings which were then welded together on site, with ultrasonic testing of the welds. The debarker unusually incorporates a bark shredder to prepare the waste bark for use as fuel.
The energy plant will be used to burn bark, dust and light oil as well as disposing of some of the waste water from the production line.
There are then two 140m conveyors, one for bark and a covered one for chips, to take the latter to two chip silos. One silo is for hardwood chips and one for softwood. Chips are then conveyed to the chip screen, washer and digester/refiner. That Metso (formerly Sunds) refiner is 60in in diameter.
The Metso dryer is a two-stage system and is followed by a buffer fibre storage bin and then a Metso Z-sifter. Fibre then passes to the cyclone above the former and on to a dosing bin designed to ensure an even flow of fibre to the former.
The former incorporates a weigh-scale and there is a weight-per-unit-area gauge after the pre-press, as well as two matspraying units.
After the continuous press there is a GreCon thickness and blister detection system. The factory also boasts 15 GreCon fire detection systems, plus a separate system for the press.
After the continuous press and the two cooling stars (with space for a third, if required, to meet future capacity demands), the Lukki storage system takes over. This fully computerised, robot-based system moves panels to the storage area and takes them to be cut to size on the Metso line, with a small packing line also available, and to the Steinemann Satos eight-head sanding line.
Although Robina has sizeable offices at the first line, a new purpose-built office block is to be erected on the new site.
Also planned for the Yichun complex is a door factory to make interior doors using flat (rather than moulded) MDF doorskins. Space for this project was allowed for when the extension to the site for MDF line two was purchased. The timing for this project will be set once the new MDF line is up and running satisfactorily.
There is a railway line adjacent to the factory site and this was used to bring some of the heavy equipment into the site during construction. This is a new facility and it is intended to make use of it for general transport of raw material and finished goods in the near future.
The new factory also has an undercover loading bay for road trucks.
The market for Robina’s fibreboard production, which will total at least 300,000m3 at Yichun, is mainly furniture factories in Guangdong, Shanghai, Beijing and Dalian, which mostly export a large percentage of their production and thus require a high-quality board.
“We don’t anticipate exporting outside China – there is no need to,” said Ms Chou. “Right now, we can’t supply enough board – hence the new line.We are supplying on a cash-only basis too and we are famous in China for this,” she said proudly. “We haven’t needed a sales office up to now, although we did open our first office in Guangzhou in 2003 and offices in Beijing and Shanghai in 2004 to increase our sales effort in preparation for the new MDF line.
“Good quality board is still rare in China so we don’t see the demand slowing down. There have been many new lines in the last two years and they have all been large capacity but China is still not producing good quality in sufficient quantity and many of those mills are still on a learning curve.
“The big difference in price in the China market is between good quality and the other boards. There are also more regulations, and they are better enforced with more inspection on the market, concerning formaldehyde release, so quality products are in increasing demand.”
Robina is making E1 and E2 grade and is working with officials on an E0 standard for the country. All the urea formaldehyde glue made at Yichun incorporates formaldehyde catchers.
“We are making moisture resistant [MR] board to Japanese standard but we are not in the market with it yet. China has no requirement for MR flooring but our base board for laminate flooring is more moisture resistant than any other producer in China,” said Ms Chou.
“We do supply all the laminate flooring manufacturers but the profit is low on flooring – it is better on furniture panels in recent years.We maintain our price for flooring panels but laminate flooring producers are down to around US$4 per m2 for export,” she said in April. “There is too much competition in the market.”
As for the future, Ms Chou and Mr Xia believe that the lack of a wood resource, and of skilled personnel, will ultimately squeeze the poorer-quality producers out of the market.

Some 200km from Shanghai, Danyang is a city of around 800,000 people, located in Jiangsu province, and is famous for spectacle manufacture, but it is also unusual in having two MDF factories with European-made production equipment.
The first to be established was called Danhua and was built by a chemical manufacturing business of the same name, which still has a large production site in the city.
The MDF factory, which produced its first board in 1995, could claim two ‘firsts’ at that time. It was the first continuous press to come into operation in China and the first MDF mill in China to be equipped with a Siempelkamp ContiRoll continuous press. At the time of start-up, the design capacity of the line was 180m3 per day.
Since Kronospan took control of the company in 2003 that output has been increased to around 250m3 per day on average. This was achieved by increasing the efficiency of the line using the experience of the Kronospan group in MDF production on continuous press lines. The company was renamed Jiangsu Kronoshuangfeng, which translates to Krono Double Phoenix.
The second European-equipped mill is Dare Global’s.
While the length of the Kronoshuangfeng press remains unchanged from its original 12.5m, (maximum width 2.5m), a flexible infeed was added in 2004.
The line is capable of making thicknesses from 3mm to 18mm, and has produced boards up to 22mm, but its main purpose today is producing 7mm and 8mm HDF with a density of up to 900kg/m3 for laminate flooring, which is also made at Danyang as a moisture resistant board.
Another speciality of the company is 4.5mm thick HDF for the manufacture of shoe heels – a specialised product of Kronoshuangfeng whose precise formulation is a closely guarded secret.
Thin MDF is also produced for sale to producers of doorskins and cupboard backs for furniture, as well as thicker board for China’s burgeoning furniture industry, which is fuelled by strong domestic demand and substantial exports.
The vast majority of production is to the E1 formaldehyde emission standard.
The raw material for the factory is composed of small pine and poplar logs (thinnings) and branches, from managed plantations. It arrives by barge on the Nanjing to Beijing canal and is off-loaded at the factory’s own quay, equipped with several cranes.
Considering the factory was formerly owned by a chemical company, it is perhaps not surprising to find it has its own resin production facility, making melamine urea formaldehyde (MUF) glues in five reactors.
The debarker was part of the original Siempelkamp supply package, while the existing Pallmann chipper is soon to be replaced by a new Klöckner unit originally purchased for Kronospan’s other Chinese MDF mill, Beijing Sinhua, in China’s capital city, but never used there.
Chipping at Danyang is carried out on a just-in-time basis so there are no piles of chips in the yard; clean chips are vital to the company’s quality targets.
The energy plant is fuelled by bark, sander dust, production waste and coal and drives the two boilers.
The refiner is a 42in Andritz unit.
The glue kitchen and the whole resination system was supplied by Imal of Italy and forming is by CMC Texpan, also of Italy and part of the Siempelkamp group. Pre-press, ContiRoll and handling systems are by Siempelkamp, while the stainless steel belts for the press are by Berndorf Band.
An Elmed metal detector is located after the pre-press.
The control room has a mixture of the original synoptic control panels and real time graphics.
After cooling, boards are conditioned for a minimum of three days before sanding in the six-head Steinemann line.
However, as you would expect with a Kronospan factory, raw board is not the end of the story at Danyang.
The factory has a Wemhöner 4ft x 16ft short-cycle press which presses two 4ft x 8ft boards per charge and is equipped with a four-station automatic lay-up system.
There are also two brand new (in March this year) Lutong Machinery Factory shortcycle presses which are each 8ft x 4ft with manual lay-up. The company says this manual lay-up means these presses are ideal for in-register embossed effects.
Printed papers come from some Chinese suppliers as well as Interprint and Schattdecor, both of whom have printing works in China. They arrive as impregnated papers and some come from the Beijing Sinhua factory which recently installed a second Vits paper impregnation line.
The laminated panels produced on these three lines are destined for Kronoshuangfeng’s own laminate flooring production facility, utilising a Torwegge double-end tenoning system to tongue and groove all four edges with a special profile.
Kronospan has made a commitment to its Chinese business and has great plans for its Danyang facility. The company has bought an area of land adjacent to the existing site which will roughly quadruple its current area and will take its property right up to the quay. A railway spur is planned soon to come alongside the river. The new site area has already been cleared but a final decision on what production facilities will be built has not yet been made.
The important thing in the Chinese MDF market, if you want to be profitable, is to ensure a high quality of production. The man responsible for this at Danyang is Kronospan’s Eugen Kohler, who has long experience in the panel industry in both machinery supply and panel manufacturing.
“Maintenance is very important, especially for the motors and gearboxes,” he says. “We maintain them as you would aircraft engines.”
Kronospan has built up quite an impressive presence in the Chinese market. It not only has two MDF factories, but also has a 70% stake in China’s biggest supplier of machinery to the panel industry, Shanghai Wood Based Panel Machinery Co.
Many people are talking of an imminent slow-down in the recent dramatic growth of the Chinese MDF manufacturing industry. They also talk of MDF taking second place to new particleboard lines in the near future.
However, demand for MDF remains strong while that for particleboard remains generally depressed.
True, there are far fewer enquiries for new continuous MDF lines currently, but this could only be an adjustment period.
What is certainly true is that the quality demands of the end-users are increasing, especially if they are exporting their production of furniture or laminate flooring. But the Chinese consumer is also becoming more sophisticated and quality conscious as home ownership rises.
That is why Kronospan says it is confident of the success of its Chinese businesses. The company can bring European know how in terms of high-quality production and it also knows how to make that quality economically, while using European equipment tried and tested in its many other mills.
It seems likely that those long-established Chinese MDF producers, using older, small capacity locally-made lines, are the ones who may have to quit the market – sooner rather than later.

The ownership may have changed and with it the acronym for the company, but Shanghai Wood Based Panel Machinery Co Ltd, now known in short as SWPM, still claims the largest market share for MDF lines in China, as well as leadership in a number of other panel machinery sectors.
It came as a surprise to many in the industry when it was announced that the giant, family-owned, Austrian-headquartered, Kronospan panel making company had enlarged its empire by taking a 70% stake in Shanghai Wood Based Panel Machinery. The contract was signed between SWBPMC and Peter Kaindl of Kronospan on October 1, 2004, but took effect on January 1 this year.
 “The business is still the same, it is just that the majority shareholder has changed,” said vice managing director Zhang Guoxian. “Before, the company was 100% owned by Shanghai Electrical Corporation Group, SEC, which is the third largest company in Shanghai after the Bao Steel Corporation and the Automobile Corporation (which has joint ventures with VW Audi and General Motors).
The SEC group had two main lines of business in the wood panel sector: SWBPMC and Green Continent. The latter company was not part of the deal with Kronospan and continues to own and operate at least five MDF factories in China.
Kronospan has adopted SWPM as the acronym for the company rather than the more cumbersome former name of SWBPMC. The other major change since it took a majority holding has been to axe 400 out of the 900 jobs at the Shanghai factory.
“Peter Kaindl saw an increasing involvement of European companies in the Chinese panel industry and this acquisition was part of his strategy for the future,” said Mr Zhang. “We are very happy with this cooperation.We were like a small boat and Kronospan was the aircraft carrier.We needed a strong partner and Kronospan has already made a big investment in buying a majority stake and will continue to invest in this company.”
 The new board of directors has five members. Two are from the former SWBPMC – Mr Wang Jinxing who continues as managing director and Mr Zhang – and three come from Kronospan.
The company had a good year in 2004, selling more than 20 MDF lines in China, employing its multi-opening presses. It also sold one of these MDF lines to Pakistan.
By March this year, the company had already signed five new multi-opening MDF line contracts in China and one for India. It had also signed one contract for a singleopening particleboard line in China.
Another five projects were under discussion at the time and this does not include SWPM’s involvement in other sectors of the panel industry.
Its short-cycle press lines continue to generate good business, as do its multi-opening lines producing high pressure laminate (HPL). “We sold many short-cycle lines last year, including some exports to India, Pakistan and elsewhere,” said Mr Zhang.
The company sold an HPL line to Formica in Shanghai and one to another Formica division, Siam PSM in Thailand, both in 2004.
Presses for the manufacture of rubber belts and printed circuit boards complement SWPM’s activities in press line manufacture.
The company makes smaller refiners for MDF fibre production, up to a maximum of 42in diameter, but larger refiners are purchased from Andritz of Austria or Pallmann of Germany.
Chippers are generally supplied by Chinese company Sufoma, which also competes to some degree on MDF lines, but only the smaller ones.
“For lines of 80,000m3-plus, we have a 100% market share in China and we are very experienced in multi-opening press lines,” said Mr Zhang. The company was founded in 1958.
While single-opening presses for particleboard are also supplied to the Chinese market, the demand in recent years has been strongly in favour of MDF and Mr Zhang does not see this changing any time soon.
“I do not see a big growth in particleboard production. Most customers in China prefer MDF. The consumption of MDF in the country is high because of new apartments being built and this will continue, with demand for HDF for laminate flooring also increasing.”
The government is not allowing the building of any new wet-process hardboard lines in the country for reasons of pollution by process effluent and the plywood industry is not in good shape, said the vice managing director. “We have had no orders for plywood press lines in the past two years.”
There is much talk of a wood raw material shortage for MDF in China, but Mr Zhang does not see any reason for concern.
“The raw material price is increasing but supply is generally no problem. The big MDF producers have plantations, particularly in the east in Jiangsu Province and in the southwest in Guangdong. Most plantations in China are of poplar, eucalyptus and pine species.”
Where SWPM does have a problem, in common with all heavy manufacturing industry in China – as elsewhere in the world – is in sourcing steel, where he admits the price is rising very steeply and supply is difficult.
For some years now, Shanghai Wood Based Panel Machinery Co Ltd has been working on the production of a continuous press for MDF production and a couple of years ago there was talk of imminent manufacture. However, Mr Zhang made it clear that the first SWPM continuous press was not likely to appear for some time yet.
“There are many technical and manufacturing problems to solve and it will be some time in the future when we may produce a continuous press.We have to design a completely new machine and this will require major investment in new machine tools, if the patent and design issues are resolved.”
The 40,000m2 factory in Anting, a city on the outskirts of Shanghai famous for its massive automotive manufacturing plants, boasts a wide range of machinery and is where the majority of components for SWPM’s machines are made. The latest addition is a large Chinese-made milling machine for use in the production of hot press platens. There is also a new workshop housing the company’s CNC machines.
All lines are assembled and tested at Anting before shipment to the customer.
So it is ‘business as usual’ at SWPM following Kronospan’s investment; the order books are healthy and the company is optimistic about the future, both for MDF and for its own share in that growing market.

Two short years ago, in April, we visited a half-built MDF factory in Danyang City, Jiangsu Province. It produced its first board in July 2003.
It was the Dare Group’s first venture into panel making; the company previously had been involved in the manufacture of silver paper for cigarette packets, specialised  packaging, aluminium alloy wheels for automobiles, cigarette filters and computer products.
It is still involved in all those activities but recent years have seen dramatic growth in Dare’s commitment to the panel industry, with the construction of three continuous MDF/HDF lines and one for particleboard.
Line two for MDF is at Fuzhou in Fujian province while line three is in Maoming in Guangdong province.
All three of these MDF lines employ Siempelkamp ContiRoll continuous presses and have design capacities of at least 200,000m3 a year each.
For its fourth line Dare Global, as the company is now known, chose to make particleboard. This line, which was under civil construction work in April and is scheduled to produce its first board at the end of this year, is a big one. Design capacity is 450,000-500,000m3 a year, again employing a ContiRoll press, to feed the particleboardstarved Chinese market. It is located in Sanming in Fujian province.
The company “hopes” to produce that first board by the end of the year, but experience indicates that its hopes are normally realised, with some very short bare earth-tofinished-panel times. History also suggests that design capacities for Dare are on the conservative side of actual production figures.
Dare Global also has two MDF lines supplied by Shanghai Wood Based Panel Machinery Co Ltd, one in Funing, Jiangsu province and the other in Fuyang, Anhui. Both are 80,000m3-capacity lines and both went into production in 2002.
The contract with Siempelkamp for the Danyang line was formally completed with a down-payment on May 15, 2002 and the first board was produced on July 31, 2003 – a feat which the company suggests was the fastest start-up in China, at 14 months.
If you take into account the fact that China went through its SARS crisis during that time, with all the restrictions on movement of labour which that imposed, the achievement is even more remarkable.
Many Chinese cities are famous for their concentration of companies manufacturing one particular product. In Huizhou, Guangdong province, for example, it is mobile phones. In Danyang, it is spectacles, but Danyang is also unusual in having two modern continuous MDF lines – Kronoshuangfeng and Dare Global.
The 29ha Dare Global site is located beside a canal and the company has a 600m-long quay with 10 cranes to unload barges loaded with logs. These are of pine, poplar and a little mixed hardwood, supplied in fixed lengths of two to three metres.
Some of the log supply comes from nearby, some from up to 1,000km away, via the Yangtse River. The mill consumes 400,000 tonnes of wood a year and normally holds about 100,000 tonnes in stock.
However, logging is banned from approximately July to September, so a buffer stock is essential during that period.
Being beside a river does have its disadvantages in that part of the site had to be piled due to the soft land and there were some challenges with regard to the press foundations, but even that evidently did not slow the project’s progress.
Logs are debarked using an Andritz drum debarker and the bark forms part of the 100% wood-based fuel supply for energy production, being carried by overhead conveyor to the Vyncke energy plant.
Andritz also supplied the disc chipper and the chips produced go to a 4,000m3-capacity concrete chip bin.
Chips are washed and screened on an oscillating screen before going to the Andritz digester and the 58in refiner.
Gluing for the line was supplied by Imal of Italy, a part-owned subsidiary of the Siempelkamp group.
The vast majority of MDF production and all laminate flooring is to E1 standard, with a little E2 in MDF, but the company plans to produce E0 very soon, as it wishes to capture some of the Japanese market.
The production line is only 1.5m off the floor so the control room is at ground level. Some say this is an advantage, while others prefer to have a greater clearance under the line for easier access for maintenance.
The Siempelkamp ContiRoll continuous hot press is 37.1m long and 8ft 6in wide and can run at a maximum speed of 1,200mm per second when producing 3mm thick panels.
Thickness and blister detection after the SHS (Siempelkamp Handling Systems) diagonal flying cross-cut saw is by Imal, while the three star coolers and all panel handling at the end of the line was imported from SHS of Germany.
From the cooler, 200mm stacks of MDF panels are assembled and then transferred by automatic overhead crane to build 4mhigh stacks which are then taken by automated transfer truck to intermediate storage on concrete bearers in the warehouse.
Sanding is carried out on a Steinemann eight-head Satos sander with mineral-cast frame and this is followed by a cut-to-size system supplied by SHS.
Master panels are cut to 4ft x 8ft, 6ft x 8ft, 7ft x 8ft and other similar sizes, but the factory is not geared up for small cut-sizes, for furniture components for example.
Dare Global occupies a very large site in Danyang. In a separate building there is a laminate flooring production line producing flooring under the Power Dekor brand, which is a joint venture with Asia Dekor, another Chinese MDF/HDF producer.
The Danyang factory produces seven million m2 of laminate flooring a year for both the domestic and export markets and, like the MDF/HDF line, runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The flooring line employs a Wemhöner short-cycle press and a Torwegge tongue and grooving line. Boards are conditioned in a special warehouse after laminating before being machined.
The paper lay-up for the presses is contained in a glazed enclosure for cleanliness and for moisture and temperature control.
A second Wemhöner short-cycle line was planned at the time of my visit in early April, with the contract already signed.
Dare also has a second laminate flooring line already in operation in another building on the site, employing Chinese-made presses. It also has a separate factory for another type of flooring – laminated flooring, which is made up of three layers of veneer, and this facility has a capacity of about two to three million m2 a year.
Completing the facilities at the Danyang complex is a small furniture production line making panel-based cabinets.
The river and the rail network are used to deliver finished products, as well as road transport. For example, boats are used as the most economical way to deliver thin board to a flooring manufacturer in Suzhou.
So we can see that Dare Global has gone from nothing to a total group panel capacity of around 1.2 million m3 in three years, making it a very significant player in the Chinese market. Its customers are in China and the Asian region in general, with a lot of its flooring being exported to both Asian countries and Europe.

There was much discussion and some considerable confusion before the opening of the two competing woodworking exhibitions in Beijing in March, the WM Fair/Furniwood China, and Chinawood.
Many European-based WBPI advertisers, who either make machinery for the panel industry, or supply ‘consumable’ products such as belts, resins and additives and so on, were uncertain what to do.
Should they comply with the advice of their national associations and support only the Chinawood event, attend both Chinawood and the established WM Fair, or just attend the WM Fair?
The situation arose because the European national machinery associations and their umbrella federation, Eumabois, say they received strong feedback from their members that the organisers of the WM Fair, Adsale Exhibitions, were over-charging for stand rental.
It seems undeniable that WM Fair’s rates were high by any standards; at least they were well before the show, when they stood at US$300-350 per m2.
“We had a clear mandate from our members to get the costs reduced,” said Georges Brun, president of Eumabois, when interviewed at the Chinawood event on March 7. “We tried to negotiate with Adsale but it was no good. We have said for some years now that US$150 per m2 is the maximum that should be charged.”
Mr Brun explained that Eumabois put their alternative show out to tender when seeking joint venture partners to organize the event and had only four replies. He said that Adsale was invited to tender but did not.
“We have been very pleased with our partner, Shanghai CMP Sinoexpo International Exhibition Co Ltd,” he said.
Eumabois also joined forces with the China National Furniture Association and the China Association for International Science and Technology Cooperation in organising the event.
Chinawood was held at the Beijing Exhibition Centre, a strikingly unusual building which really comprises a collection of assembly rooms. An exhibition partly lit by chandeliers was certainly a new experience.
The venue provided 16,000m2 of floor space and housed nearly 150 exhibiting companies from 14 countries and regions, with Germany having its largest-ever national woodworking pavilion in China, according to Eumabois. There were 25 companies from Taiwan and just nine from China.
Visitor numbers, although requested, were not available as WBPI went to press at the end of March.
Both WM Fair and Chinawood featured conferences and seminars alongside the exhibitions.
“We still hope to have only one exhibition in Beijing in future but we are set on our own path now,” said Mr Brun. “We charge all exhibitors the same rate per square metre. We already have the Taiwan woodworking machinery association on board and North America is seriously considering joining us. We will probably hold another exhibition in 2005, in the south of China.”
The WM Fair/Furniwood held its 10th biennial event in the China International Exhibition Centre (CIEC).
The event is held in a traditional, large setting of a group of big exhibition halls, although it has to be said that the CIEC is showing its age.
The WM Fair has the support of the State Forestry Administration of the Peoples’Republic of China, the China International Forestry Group Corporation, China Council for the Promotion of International Trade and, this year, the China National Forestry Machinery Association.
As one major exhibiting company’s spokesman, and an experienced China hand, said: “The Chinese people pay a lot of attention to the ‘official’ view of a fair – the involvement of the ministry of forestry for example. WM had that kind of backing and, unless an alternative fair gets blessing at ministry level, they will find it difficult to stay in the market.”
This year’s WM event occupied nine halls, with one being reserved for Furniwood, the furniture accessories, materials and wood products section. Adsale reports 468 exhibitors, in a floor area of 35,000m2, and 32,102 visitors.
“We have cooperated well with Eumabois in the past, but two years ago there were policy differences, mainly with regard to price,” admitted Parry Chung, senior sales and marketing manager with Adsale Exhibition Services of Hong Kong, when interviewed at the show on March 4.
“We are aware that we need to make some changes but there are differences between, say, Ligna in Germany and this show. Yes, we do charge more per square metre than Ligna, but some visitors to Ligna are charged entry and they are charged for the catalogue, but not here; in China, we cannot attract the quality of visitors if we charge for entry or the catalogue. “We also need to consider the venue. This venue is owned by semi-government bodies and costs a lot more to rent than the Beijing Exhibition Centre, which is an old building with difficult access for large machinery. The organiser of Ligna in Germany also owns the [Hannover] venue and does not have to rent on the open market.”
It should be mentioned here that Chinawood also offered free entry and a free catalogue.
I asked Mr Chung why, if he could reduce the price for ‘last minute’ bookings from European companies to levels below those charged by Chinawood – which he did - he did not do so before.
“We didn’t say [to Eumabois] that there would be no negotiation on price but we cannot move too fast; we need to go step-by- step in price reduction. Eumabois did not agree with this. We have reduced the price per square metre step-by-step since 2000 and we will consider reducing our price again for 2006,” he replied.
“We have booked this venue again for 2006 (March 7-10) and we want to enter a dialogue with Eumabois about this. We try to listen and to do what we can. We will collect opinions from our potential clients and then work out a plan.”
Mr Chung admitted that Chinese exhibitors pay less than overseas companies at his fair and said his company needed to increase the rents for these companies in order to reduce charges to those overseas.
So what did the exhibitors think? At WBPI, we conducted a survey of the major exhibitors, for the panel industry only.
The unanimous view of respondents was that there must be only one, biennial, show in Beijing in the future and that the charges for stand space must fall within the range of US$150 to a maximum of US$180 per m2. The vast majority of them believe that Adsale will reduce its rates for 2006 to acceptable levels. That remains to be seen of course.
Views on the relative merits of the two venues were approximately equally divided.
A majority of respondents indicated that they believed their customers preferred the WM Fair, mainly because it had a lot of Chinese exhibiting companies.
The majority of those respondents who exhibited at both events felt that WM attracted the greater number of important contacts for them and that it offered the better value. But, it must be pointed out that, in most cases, these companies booked into WM fair late and thus paid much lower rates – maybe 50% lower – than those which booked well in advance.
On the question of which event they would support if both were to be repeated in 2006, 60% said WM Fair, while 40% said they would follow the advice of their national association.
The message, and perhaps the challenge, to the organisers of both The WM Fair and Chinawood, from the major European suppliers to the panel industry in China, and not from this magazine itself, is clear.
They want one show, in Beijing, at the right price, with a full range of exhibitors from China as well as around the world so that they have the best opportunity to promote their products to this very important market. That is the one objective.

As regular readers will know, there were two exhibitions held in Beijing in March this year, instead of the normal one, biennial, WM Fair.
It was the 10th edition of the jointly-held WM Fair China and Furniwood China, organised by Adsale Exhibition Services Ltd of Hong Kong. This event was, as usual, held at the large China International Exhibition Centre, on March 2-5.
Due to the high cost of renting stand space at this exhibition, Eumabois, the European federation of 12 national associations representing the largest European manufacturers of machines and accessories for woodworking, decided to organise its own, competing, exhibition called Chinawood. This event was held on March 7-10 at the Beijing Exhibition Centre.
Initially, the majority of European manufacturers of machinery for the panel making industry booked space only at the Chinawood event.
However, some of them subsequently negotiated rates ‘at the last minute’ for stand space rental at the WM Fair which were in fact lower than those at Chinawood, and so these companies attended both exhibitions.
Reflecting the importance and sudden growth of the panel industry in China in recent years, the WM Fair had a designated ‘Panelboard Equipment Zone’ in hall 2, where most suppliers to the panel industry were located.
Andritz of Austria reported that it had supplied close to 70 of its MDF refiners to China so far. These contracts have been both direct to the client and through contractors who supplied the whole, or major parts of, the production line.
In common with many others, Andritz feels that the number of new projects will probably continue to decrease as considerable new MDF capacity comes on line in China. The company exhibited at both fairs.
Anthon of Germany also attended both, promoting its saw systems for panel mills.
The company has sold eight lines to China so far, with the last order being for the Fuzhou particleboard line due to start up this year. The other seven lines were delivered in 2003 and six of them included feeding, sanding (sub-contracted), cut-tosize and packing as a supply package.
However, Anthon’s involvement in the Chinese market goes back much further, as it supplied equipment for a line to make beer barrels in 1905. It also delivered to a similar project last year. It has supplied to Dieffenbacher’s, Metso’s and Siempelkamp’s complete-line contracts.
Berndorf-Hueck attended Chinawood to promote Berndorf’s stainless steel continuous press belts and Hueck’s plain and engraved press plates for decorative laminates. Berndorf also displayed its belt patching/ refurbishing tools and its dry ice belt cleaner.
So far, the company claims a better than 40% share of the Chinese market for new press lines with continuous steel belts. It has a sales and service centre in Beijing with 10 staff, including four service engineers.
Binos Technologies was exhibiting for the first time in Beijing, at the Chinawood show.
It was offering a new Mende-type press of its own construction, with spike roll former developed in conjunction with Flakeboard of Canada and a spike roll sifter, as well as mechanical/pneumatic MDF glue blending, and modified secondhand Mende presses.
Angelo Cremona of Italy has quite a long history of supplying the plywood and veneer industries in China and worldwide and exhibited at Chinawood only. Like all European machinery makers who want to compete in this market, Cremona sells on its quality of engineering to companies wishing to produce a high-grade plywood or veneer.
Dieffenbacher was one of the companies which made a late decision to attend the WM Fair as well as Chinawood. It booked the stand under the name of Dieffenbacher Ziesenhausen at WM and the parent company at Chinawood. Zaisenhausen is the handling equipment and short-cycle press side of the business. Recently taken into full ownership, Schenkmann & Piel was also present on the stand.
Dieffenbacher’s latest tally is around 12 complete lines supplied to China in the past year, although one or two are, as yet, not finally confirmed.
Resin company Dynea, headquartered in Finland, has a group office in Shanghai and supplies resin to a number of panel mills in the country. It chose to exhibit only at WM.
Electronic Wood Systems (EWS) of Germany also attended both shows and was able to report that it had sold three thickness gauges for Mende lines and two laboratory testing lines at the WM Fair. One lab system went to the Nanjing Forestry University and the other to an MDF mill. The company also sold five spark extinguishing systems at the first fair.
Firefly attended only the WM Fair and was happy with the number of positive leads it had received. This specialist in fire protections systems supplies a wide range of industries but mainly the panel business to date in China. Press protection is especially strong for the company and its ‘electronic nose’ is attracting attention.
“Mills are becoming increasingly aware of the risks of fire, especially with the new continuous lines,” said Jamshid Lodhi, sales and marketing manager.
Giben of Italy exhibited at both events and moved its Smart SP saw with grippers from the first to the second venue. The company reported that the WM Fair was “very bad for us” although the few visitors did show a lot of interest in the saw on display.
Giben is aiming more for the panel processing and furniture production areas in China than for the primary panel industry and has supplied over 200 machines to the furniture sector – 15 in 2003.
“We have had an increasing presence in China over the last 18 months for our energy production systems in panel mills and we have supplied three lines recently – Lishui Oak MDF, Luyuan MDF and Dare Wood MDF,” said Reinhold Luthringshauser of GTS Energy of the US.
The company reported a further four contracts at the time of the WM Fair and was discussing a particleboard project with cogeneration. It has a representative office in China, run by Mr Naicheng Zhou.
Another American company at WM was Globe Machinery which worked with Burelbach Industries on the supply of the handling for the Shendor doorskin line in Shenyang and another similar line in Jilin Province.
The company shares a Beijing office with another US firm, M-E-C, which has two particleboard lines under construction in Jilin and Heliongjiang provinces.
German specialist in on-the-line quality control and fire protection, GreCon, exhibited only at Chinawood and Günther Hänsch said he would like to have seen more Chinese exhibitors at the show.
The company has its equipment on many of the new continuous lines in China. It has 50 weight-per-unit-area gauges and 50 moisture analysers in operation as well as around 100 thickness gauges and “hundreds” of spark detection systems.
“We are also concentrating on lower priced, simple measuring systems for older lines where the mill needs to improve panel quality,” said Mr Hänsch. Here the company supplies the high-tech parts, while frames can be fabricated locally to GreCon’s drawings. The company will open a new subsidiary in Pudong (Shanghai) in June/July.
Grenzebach of Germany (formerly Babcock BSH) concentrates on veneer dryers for sliced veneers in China and said that a lot of its customers were importing logs for slicing. The company claims to be the market leader in China, with 20 installations so far. A spokesman said the Chinawood show was very quiet and not worth the money. Grenzebach prefers its own seminars with invited audiences. It runs these jointly with Fisher & Rückle, BASF and a satisfied customer from Malaysia. It has agents in Shanghai and Guangzhou.
Imal of Italy attended only the Chinawood show, together with sister company Pal srl.
Imal was promoting its new and secondhand plants, its new MDF and other gluing systems and its laboratory and on-the-line quality control equipment. It is cooperating with German companies Modul and Berstorff in supplying brand new Mendetype press lines to China and elsewhere. It also began a cooperation with Fusoni in 2003. Fusoni makes release agents for use in continuous presses and Imal makes the mat surface damping spray equipment.
Pal srl was concentrating on wood recycling equipment in a country that is notoriously short of fresh wood. The company has recently supplied its first such line in China for making MDF from a mixture of recycled and fresh wood.
Italian wide-belt sander maker Imeas already has a joint venture company manufacturing four feet wide sanders in China (Imeas Sander manufacturing (Suzhou) Co Ltd) and this company was represented alongside the Italian parent Imeas spa at WM, while Imeas spa was alone at Chinawood.
This reflected the fact that the Chinese company felt that WM was a better event for its customers. This company was formed a year ago and has already sold over 40 machines to smaller particleboard and MDF mills, mainly for new Chinese-made lines.
Imeas spa sold four 7ft and 8ft wide lines in China in the last year, to Asia Dekor MDF; Hebei Yingyang MDF; Jilin Forest, Changchun, particleboard; and Langxiang Forestry, Heilongjiang, also for particleboard. Imeas ran a seminar on the second day of WM Fair, attended by 45 delegates.
Kuper from Germany normally supplies new veneer processing equipment and secondhand lines but at the WM Fair was exhibiting its new PUR Lightboard System for making honeycomb-cored lightweight furniture panels using PUR glues and cold pressing. Kuper sells in China through its agent, Golden Field.
Maier, also from Germany, attended both shows, bringing with it a knife-ring flaker (KFR), series MRZ-1400HS, which it transported to the Chinawood show as well.
Maier is now delivering a high speed KFR, MRZHS with 60 knives to Fuzhou Company, a Metso main contract, to produce both homogeneous and normal particleboard, by using two different rings. The client also bought a sharpening machine with automatic knife protrusion setting.
Jilin Forest Industry Co will take delivery of a high-speed KFR in June, again for particleboard on a line supplied by Metso.
The Langxiang Forest Bureau particleboard mill in Heilongjiang will receive two high-speed KFRs and an MPM surface layer chipper in September.
Having brought its KFR for display purposes only, Robert Loth, chief executive of Maier, was pleased to report at the Chinawood show that he had sold the machine on the first morning to Dong Dun of Changshu, together with additional components to be brought from Germany. He was even more delighted to report a similar, second, sale in the same afternoon!
Among the three complete line general contractors for composite panels, Metso Panelboard was one of two to exhibit at both shows. As part of the Metso Group, this company has access to a sales and service operation, principally serving the group’s paper machinery operations, in Wuxi.
“We are getting an increasing number of enquiries for particleboard lines,” said China area manager Thomas Sternold. “The price of particleboard is rising, while that for MDF is falling, at least for thicker board, and end-users are increasingly looking at the quality of particleboard as exports increase.”
Metso Panelboard has two recent orders for complete lines. One is the Robina ll line at Yichung, Jiangxi Province, a 200,000m3 MDF line due to start up in early 2005, with a Metso continuous press.
The second line is for Fujian Furen Wood Industry Co Ltd at Fuzhou, Fujian Province, which is to be a 255,000m3 particleboard line, again with a Metso continuous press.
In common with many other observers of the Chinese market at the present time, Mr Sternold believes that there will be more MDF lines built, but that particleboard will become increasingly favoured.
Minimax of Germany attended both shows to present its equipment for fire protection and spark detection for MDF lines. It also has a subsidiary in China, Minimax (Beijing) Firefighting System Co Ltd.
Modul Systeme, also of Germany, exhibited at the Chinawood event only; this was the company’s first exhibition in China.
“In the past, we had problems supplying our secondhand, reconditioned, machinery to China because of the 30% duty,” explained Eberhard Kühnlein of Modul. “Now, with more joint-venture companies, there are more possibilities because the duty does not apply.We can also now offer a new Berstorff Mende-type press as well as secondhand ones.”
Pallmann of Germany took a booth at Chinawood but not at the WM Fair. The company opened an office in Beijing in November 2002 for sales and service of its wood-size-reduction machinery and refiners.
“We have had many orders from China over the years,” said ceo Hartmut Pallmann, saying that the company had received nine new orders in 2003 which it sold directly to the mills, in addition to those which it sold through the main contractors. Recent orders include two 62in MDF refiners for Sichuan Guodong and Dare Global.
Pallmann will also deliver the complete flake preparation system to the massive Mieco particleboard project in Malaysia in June/July.
Raute of Finland also only exhibited at Chinawood. A spokesman admitted that the Chinese market was difficult because of low price expectations, but said the company was looking for customers who want world quality machinery for plywood, LVL or parquet production lines.
Sandvik and its partner, Hindrichs- Auffermann, were at both exhibitions. Jan- Ola Johnson of Sandvik said that his company had supplied belts to 18 out of 31 continuous panel lines in China, as well as 10 belts to Chinese makers of multi-opening presses with continuous belt carrier systems.
Hindrichs-Auffermann, in whose name the Chinawood stand was listed, currently produces technical plates (for PCBs) in China but will soon start refurbishing press plates supplied to the panel industry as well.
Shanghai Wood Based Panel Machinery Co Ltd (SWBPMC) exhibited at both shows, reflecting its increasing interest in exporting its range of panel making and processing machinery. The industry still awaits news of this company’s first continuous press, which is likely to come next year. Sia Abrasives of Switzerland exhibited only at the WM Fair, showing its range of abrasive belts for all sectors of the woodworking industry.
Siempelkamp showed only at Chinawood in line with VDMA and Eumabois guidelines. This supplier of complete lines has recently supplied the Luyuan and Dare Wood MDF plants in China.
The company also sees the rapid rise in MDF production in the country slowing and the strong possibility that particleboard lines will become more popular investments. Shortage of raw material is always a constraining factor, pointed out Rolf Kamper of Siempelkamp. However, he does believe that OSB will come to China in time.
The company has full representation for sales and service in China through its Beijing office.
With its many subsidiary and partner companies, Siempelkamp can offer the full range of equipment for a complete continuous, or indeed discontinuous, panel production line, from design to final commissioning, including all electronic and computerised controls.
Steinemann of Switzerland is the major European supplier of wide belt sanding machines to the panel industry in China and has supplied 90 lines to mills there, including orders for 14 Satos models in the last 18 months. The company attended both Beijing shows. “This year, about half our total sales will be to Asia, mainly China,” said vice-president of Steinemann Technology Hansjörg Fritsche.
New lines are not the only source of business as a number of mills with locally supplied production lines want to improve their surface quality, he said. The company has had an office in Beijing since October and a service person in Guangzhou as well.
Vits Systems also exhibited at both shows. In fact, at WM it was represented twice as its Chinese joint venture company, Vits-Imaco, also had a stand there.
The company has around 18 of its paper impregnation lines in China, with two currently under installation, at Dare Wood in Danyang and at Krono-Sinhua in Beijing.
Vyncke of Belgium has supplied over 20 energy generation plants to China – 14 of them since 2002. The company had five plants under erection at the time of the shows (it exhibited at both) and had just received an order from Guodong in Chengdu, Sichuan Province. Other projects include Dare line ll in Fuzhou and Dare lll, Asia Dekor and Weihua in Guangdong, Beihai in Guangxi (a locally-made MDF line) and Dongying in Shandong Province.
“We are moving our China office from Beijing to Shanghai to be nearer to our customers and to the sea port for storage of spare parts.We are also taking on four more people for service and project management,” said sales chief Lieven Tarras.
Wemhöner Pressen of Germany has an enviable reputation for its short cycle press lines in China, in spite of, or perhaps helped by, local competition which seems unable to match its quality. It exhibited only at Chinawood.
Wemhöner supplied a short cycle line to Asia Dekor and several other Chinese panel mills and was just completing commissioning of a line at Dare Wood MDF. It also supplies 3-D presses to the furniture industry in China.

The final part of the drive to Guangxi Sunway Forest Product Industry Group’s mills in Wuzhou has to be one of the most spectacular in the Chinese panel industry, as the road winds along the side of the Zhujiang river valley for several kilometres. The company’s latest mill is built in a commanding position on the banks of the river a few kilometres from Wuzhou itself.
To be fair, I suspect the approach to the Lishui Oak mill may be equally spectacular, also along a river valley, but as I arrived there at far too well past midnight, and from the wrong direction, it was difficult to be sure.
Founded in 1921 as Wuzhou Zhicheng Board Mill, Guangxi Sunway produced particleboard largely by hand on a small scale. In 1989, the company imported a Sunds (now Metso) single-opening press line from Sweden to manufacture particleboard and this line has an annual production capacity of 50,000m3.
The line has a two-head wind former. The press is large, at 32ft long and 8ft wide, meaning it can accommodate eight panels per cycle, and operates on the recycling steel caul belt system. It is enclosed in a housing and the small glazed control room with synoptic controls is located alongside the press at ground level.
The line is supplied with steam and thermal oil by a locally-made energy plant.
In a neighbouring building on the same site in Wuzhou, a few kilometres from Sunway’s latest project, there is a more modern continuous MDF line. This has its own energy plant, independent of the particleboard line, and the wood supply for the two lines is also kept in separate areas of the same woodyard. The whole line, including the energy plant, was supplied by the former Sunds company in 1996 and fibre from the Sunds refiner passes to an ABB Fläkt Pendistor former.
The continuous press was made by Küsters of Germany, now also part of the Metso group of course. It was originally supplied with a length of 12.5m, but in 1999 was extended to 17.5m, increasing the MDF line’s output capacity from 50,000m3 to 100,000m3 per year.
The Steinemann sander has six heads, followed by a further two heads, added more recently and made by Chinese company Sulin.
Another building on the same site houses the laminating lines. Here there are three short-cycle laminating lines, giving a total capacity of six million m2 of surfaced panels per annum.
All three lines are from Wemhöner of Germany and the newest is a single-opening 4ft x 16ft press, used mainly for the manufacture of laminate flooring.
The factory employs manual lay-up for the surfacing films, rather than the automatic systems which are perhaps more relevant where labour costs are higher than in China.
The same building houses the two laminate flooring lines employing Paul multi-rip saws for cutting the flooring strips, while machining of the edges is carried out by Homag and Torwegge equipment. Annual output is five million m2.
In 2000, Guangxi Sunway Forest Products Industrial Co Ltd was established and a new factory built in Cenxi City, Wuzhou, which went in to production in 2001. Sunway Forest Products Cenxi Artificial Board Co Ltd produces 150,000m3 of MDF annually on a mixture of Germanand Chinese-sourced equipment.
The latest line for Sunway is unusual in that it brings together two major equipment suppliers in one line; the press is from Dieffenbacher, but the contract for the rest of the line was placed with the successor company to the supplier of Sunway’s other lines at Wuzhou, Metso Panelboard.
“We bought this line by open bidding on the internet,” said Mr Fang Fengchao, an engineer with the Wuzhou factories. “Which company would win was dependent on price, quality and a number of other factors, including the fact that we wanted to make mainly HDF panels.
“Metso and Dieffenbacher offered the best combination of price and of meeting our requirements for production. I am not saying one press [Küsters or Dieffenbacher] is better than the other – they are different.”
The site chosen for the new line was cut back out of the hillside beside the river Zhujiang and building work commenced in September 2002. The first board was produced from the line on December 5, 2003.
The wood raw material is a mix of softwood and mixed hardwoods, mainly thinnings, branches and mis-shapen logs. Some bought-in chips are also used. Sunway does not employ a debarker.
An undercover belt conveyor takes the chips into the chipper building where there are two Bruks-Klöckner chippers. Hardwood and softwood are chipped separately and the chips conveyed to two separate, round, concrete silos which are tiled on the outside, as is common practice in China.
For some board 100% hardwood chips are used, while for most production hard and softwood are mixed 50/50 or 60/40.
The silos have a circulating rotating screw in the base to move the chips to an  underground conveyor and up to the chip screen which separates out the oversize chips and the fines for fuel. Accepted chips pass up a bucket elevator to the chip washer at the top of the adjacent refiner building.
The refiner is a 66in Metso unit but the motor was supplied by a Chinese sub-contractor. Everything from here to the press, and beyond the press, was in Metso’s scope of supply.
The dryer is a two-stage system, with the first stage outside and the second stage, with fibre bin and sifter, inside the main production building.
The energy plant is fuelled by sanding dust, sawdust, screening rejects and board trimmings.
The mechanical former has adjustable width, from 8ft to 9ft, and this is followed by the Metso pre-press, Cassel metal detector, and GreCon traversing x-ray mat density analyser. GreCon also supplied thickness gauges after the main press.
The production hall which houses the main line is well lit by roof windows during  aylight hours and houses the Dieffenbacher CPS continuous press. This is 42.88m long, with room for extension, although there are currently no plans at Sunway to increase its length. It is nine feet wide.
Fumes from the press are extracted by pipe, meaning that the press is not enclosed in a full housing – which must be advantageous for maintenance (as well as photography!).
The control room alongside has all the latest controls and is, unusually, equipped with the latest flat screen monitors.
A Lukki robotised panel handling and stocking system handles the panels from the line. A Steinemann eight-head sander and a Metso cut-to-size line handle the finishing of the raw panels.
Capacity is around 300,000m3 a year, based on 9ft wide, 8mm HDF.
The company has no plans to increase its MDF/HDF capacity at present and has an eye on the rapid expansion of the supply in China in recent times.
Any future plans seem more likely to relate to particleboard than to fibreboards. Other, related, activities of the group include the production of 100,000 tons a year of urea formaldehyde resins to E1 standard.
Value-adding, as we have seen, is important to Sunway and, in 2002, the company added a Vits melamine paper impregnation line on the 110,000m2 Sunway Hi-tech Industrial Park where its new HDF line is located. This has a capacity of 20 million m2 and the full range of treatment for all products, including wear-resistant layers for laminate flooring.
The group also has a furniture production line making 60,000 items of panelbased furniture annually, on equipment imported from Italy and Germany in 1993. The furniture is exported worldwide.
Raw material supply for the Guangxi Sunway Forest Products Industry Group’s wood-based activities is guaranteed and underpinned by its forestry activities, giving the company a sustainable approach.
In fact the company has its ‘Double Million Project’ which aims for one million acres of forest base and one million m3 of what it calls ‘synthetic board’ capacity.
And to go with that scenic approach to its new Wuzhou factory, Sunway also has ISO 14001 certification for its environmental management systems.

Many companies involved in the MDF business in China are now realizing the need to produce a high-quality panel that will meet the kind of standards expected in western Europe, for example.
Asia Dekor Industries (Shenzhen) Co Ltd, headquartered in Shenzhen City in China’s southern province of Guangdong, has been making overlaid panels to those high standards for some years.
In fact, the company claims to be the largest manufacturer and distributor of laminate flooring in China and the Power Dekor brand has been ranked by the China Industrial Information Issuing Centre as the best selling laminated floor product in China for five consecutive years from 1998 to 2003.
The company is part of Asia Dekor Holdings Ltd, a truly international company in both structure and manufacturing policy. Asia Dekor Holdings Ltd is incorporated in Bermuda and its ordinary shares are listed on the main board of Singapore Exchange Securities Trading Ltd.
The group has a total of three factories in Guangdong and started out with one line for tongue-and-grooving (T&G) flooring in Shenzhen in 1997. Two years later, a second factory was built, also in Shenzhen, with two paper impregnation lines, one by Vits of Germany and the other of local manufacture, and two laminating lines, one by Dieffenbacher and the other by Wemhöner, again both German companies.
The second factory also added two T&G lines by Torwegge to replace the first machining line. The first factory was also closed and the equipment moved to another factory closer to the second one.
In order to achieve the high quality of flooring on which the company based its sales message, Asia Dekor imported high density fibreboard (HDF) from European manufacturers such as Fantoni, Egger, Kronotex and Kaindl.
The panels imported are 2070mm x 2610mm because of the size of the printed decor paper sheets, which are also mainly imported from Europe. European suppliers of this paper are Schattdecor, Interprint, Mepa and others, as well as Schattdecor’s printing works in Shanghai.
Once the second factory was established, Asia Dekor also started to produce veneerfaced flooring on an MDF base, as well as skirting to match the flooring.
“Sales of laminate flooring in China are growing at 20-30% a year on the domestic market,” said Mr Tong Guang Zhou, mechanical engineer and vice general manager with the company. He is the man responsible for the development of Asia Dekor’s latest, ambitious project, as well as for its existing flooring factories.
That latest project is the construction of a new state-of-the-art continuous HDF production line.
“Our production of laminate flooring in 2002 was six million m2 and in 2003 it was 10 million m2, with about five to ten per cent exported to South Asia, the Middle East, Australia and South America,” said Mr Tong.
“In China we go for the top end of the market with the best quality in the country because we are using the highest level technology, as used in Europe, and our raw material is the same as Europe. So is the management of our company,” he added.
“We actually started out selling laminate flooring imported from Europe in 1995 but the price has gone down a lot already on the Chinese market, with a lot more competitors. We need to have the best quality and the best service but also a competitive price.
“Imported board is expensive so we decided it was time to make our own board.We have those two laminating lines which, at full capacity, can produce 12 to 14 million m2 of laminate flooring a year, equivalent to 100- 120,000m3 of panel, so we already had the basis for a good-sized MDF/HDF factory.”
So the company decided to invest around US$36m in a 200,000m3 a year line which would provide 50-60% of its production for Asia Dekor’s own laminate flooring consumption and 40-50% for sale as raw board.
The first requirement for such a large production line is an adequate supply of wood and the warm climate of Guangzhou, together with the founding of eucalyptus plantations in the province up to 10 years ago, means that wood supply is plentiful. There is also availability of pine.
“I see no problem with raw material and we have already discussed with the local government renting land for plantations in the next two or three years, so our wood supply will increase,” said Mr Tong.
Actually, of course, the first requirement for a factory of this size is scheduled industrial land. That Asia Dekor found in Heyuan City in the north of Guangdong Province, about 200km from its existing factories in Shenzhen.
It is a long and narrow strip of land sandwiched between the main road at the front and the river at the back. It is opposite the railway station on the Beijing to Hong Kong main line, which may provide opportunities for transport when the factory is up and running. At the time of purchase the land also sloped, with a fall in height of 14m from one end to the other.
“We first had to build what we call ‘the great wall’ alongside the river for nearly one kilometre, as a retaining wall to stop our land slipping into the river,” recalled Mr Tong. “The land was also undulating and before we came, it was flattened by removing the tops of the high parts and using that material to fill the hollows. This meant that the land was relatively soft in the made-up areas and hard on the former high points. Thus we needed different foundations in different areas of the site – including along the length of the new continuous press.”
The other major requirement for a project of this size – a strong and reliable electricity supply – was no problem.
“Two years ago this was not the case and electricity supply would have been a problem, but the local government has supported industrial development in the area,” said Mr Tong. “It also appreciates the help that the tree plantations give to the local farmers and has given a lot of help and support to our company.”
However, Heyuan is in a beautiful area, one that is popular with tourists. The river supplies the drinking water to Shenzhen and Hong Kong and there is a lake/reservoir nearby so the government would not encourage any polluting industries.
Asia Dekor’s new MDF/HDF line has a waste water settling and treatment plant which will enable it to recycle a lot of its process water, while solid waste will be removed by a specialist contractor for treatment, or burnt in the energy plant together with bark, sanding dust and other wood residues.
Groundwork started on March 26, 2003, but progress was then effectively halted until May by the rainy season. At the time of my visit in early March this year, all major machinery was installed and under final assembly and electrical installation for the main production line, while some parts, such as the resin plant, were still under construction; the latter being surrounded with bamboo scaffolding. The foundations for the boiler house and woodyard were also awaiting completion of ‘the great wall’.
It was expected that the first board would be produced by mid- to end-May this year.AThe total area of the new factory is 160,000m2 and the layout is very typical of a European MDF mill.
Asia Dekor appointed five main contractors for the project: Dieffenbacher was awarded the main contract for the CPS continuous press and associated line; Andritz the woodyard and refiner; Vyncke of Belgium the energy plant, Anthon of Germany the cut-to-size; and Imeas of Italy the sanding line.
The scope of supply of Dieffenbacher actually covered from the Schenkmann & Piel dryer to the Scheuch of Austriadesigned complete dust filtration system, gluing, forming, pre-press, main press and a sub-contract to Kontra for cooling and panel handling after the press.
The cyclone tower, still under construction, will be the tallest building in the city when it is finished, topping out at 67m.
Debarking will be carried out by a locally- made debarking drum. Chipping is by Andritz Oy of Finland and the Andritz of Austria refiner is a 54/60in unit, to be started at 54in as Asia Dekor will build up its capacity over a period of time; it anticipates producing 75-80% in its first year.
There are two, 15m-high, concrete chip silos and chips will be transported underground to a bucket elevator to lift them up to the chip screen by Andritz Oy. Behind the silos, the Vyncke energy system was under construction.
The dryer tube is 2.6m in diameter and will transport 30 bone dry tons per hour (bdtph) of fibre across the site. Forming is mechanical with a scalper located very close to the Schenck/Dieffenbacher weigh-scale for a rapid reaction time. An Imal bottom belt dampening unit precedes the former and there is another before the hot press to damp the top surface of the mat.
“The pre-press is a new generation which does not have an endless belt, but one which we can joint on site and this makes belt changing much easier,” said Mr Tong.
The Dieffenbacher CPS press has 24 frames and is 31.5m long and 2.65m (net) wide. It is extendable to 35.5m. The master panel ex-press will be 6.3m x 2.65m.
A combined quality control unit by GreCon has five thickness and 12 blow detector heads.
After cooling, the boards will be handled by an automatic robot stacking system byKontra, employing a rail-based system and concrete bearers. There is capacity for eight days’ production here.
To meet local safety regulations, unusually the whole storage area is surrounded by a brick fire wall. Asia Dekor already has equipment from Firefly of Sweden to protect its laminate flooring factories from the outbreak of fire and also awarded it the contract for the new continuous line.
As of March, Asia Dekor had few experienced staff to operate the new line, admitted Mr Tong. However, he was in contact with some experienced Chinese personnel and was also considering employing some European technicians on short-term contracts to get the line under way. He anticipates that 120 staff will be needed to run the entire Heyuan operation.
Its sales and distribution network is already well established.
“We have two completely separate systems operating in the company: production and marketing and the two are totally separate,” said Mr Tong. “The headquarters for all the company’s sales operations are located in Shanghai and the factories manufacture to order from there.We store all the various kinds of MDF and decor paper at the factory and when we get an order from Shanghai we decide which kind of production to schedule.
“We have 700 shops throughout China selling our flooring products.”
Asia Dekor has joined forces with another major MDF producer in China, Dare Wood (WBPI June/July 2003, p14) to achieve this coverage.
However, there is more to Asia Dekor than just laminate flooring, especially with the new Heyuan line coming on stream and able to offer raw board.
But that is still not the end of the story for this ambitious company. Plans are already foot to build a particleboard line near Huizhou, about half way between Heyuan and the flooring factories in Shenzhen. This will be another continuous line with a similar capacity to Heyuan – about 200,000m3 a year.
The company is already laminating some furniture panels in its Shenzhen facilities, using particleboard imported from Europe.
“Guangdong accounts for about 80% of Chinese furniture exports, to Europe and North America; Donguan, about 150km from here, has a lot of furniture production and one factory I know there is importing 450 containers a year of particleboard from Thailand.
“Particleboard is cheaper than MDF but the transport cost is high. If we make our own board, we can get the quality we want and save those transport costs,” said Mr Tong.
Further possible developments for Asia Dekor include the construction of a laminating factory behind the new MDF line at Heyuan, on the same site.
“There are four important points for a factory: resources, money, technology and marketing,” asserted Mr Tong. “We have all those.
“We aim to be a ‘show factory’ and we told all our machinery tenderers that. They will be welcome to bring their customers here to see our factory as a reference plant. We will be the best in China for MDF.”
Mr Tong is even talking to a Japanese landscaping company about making the outside of his factory look as good as the inside and helping it to ‘blend in’ as far as possible in a popular tourist area.

Another mill, another fantastically scenic journey, this time from Wuzhou through the mountains to Rongcheng Town, Ronxian County.
The road winds through terraced slopes of paddy fields and past fields of maize and other cereal crops, through villages and towns, to finally arrive at the home town of Guangxi Gaofeng Rongzhou Wood Based Panels Co Ltd in Rongcheng.
The factory site is impressive and houses the company’s latest investment in the form of a Dieffenbacher continuous MDF/HDF line.
The Gaofeng Group was founded in 1953 and has always been involved in forestry and the manufacture of industrial wood products.
In Nanning City, some three hours drive away, is an MDF line with a multi-opening press also supplied by Dieffenbacher, in 1997. This line has a nameplate capacity of 50,000m3 a year but can go up to 70,000m3, making MDF for furniture panels.
On the same site in Nanning is an older, smaller line, built by Shanghai Wood Based Panel Machinery Co Ltd and this was Gaofeng’s first line in that city. The capacity is a modest 40,000m3.
A third MDF line is located about 100km from Rongcheng in Luchuan, also in Guangxi Province. This 80,000m3 designcapacity line has a refiner from Andritz of Austria, but the rest of the line is from Chinese suppliers. Production exceeds the nominal capacity here too.
Thus the company already had in excess of 200,000m3 of MDF capacity when it decided to invest in a new European-made continuous line.
As is often the case, the existing lines were not suited to the manufacture of thinner boards and Gaofeng felt that a large part of its market in the future lay in these thicknesses.
The new factory is 75% owned by the Gaofeng Group, with 25% being held by an investor located in Macao. The Gaofeng Group itself is government owned and is headquartered in the city of Nanning.
“The new line is for thin board in 2.5mm, 3.0mm and 4.8mm thicknesses, to supply the furniture and specialist packaging industries,” explained Mr Qin Qiong Lin, general manager of the company with responsibility for the new factory.
“Later we will perhaps make 8mm for the laminate flooring industry, but there is so much flooring capacity in China already.
We hope to gain export markets with the new production as we currently only supply
the domestic market.”
Construction of the new line began on the 208mu (13.8ha) site in January 2001 and installation of the production line began in March 2003, with the first board being produced on November 12, 2003.
The woodyard contains mostly pine logs, with some eucalyptus. This area of the factory, the debarker and the chipper were all supplied by Pallmann of Germany.
A log-grab tractor first feeds the logs to the debarker, which discharges them to an unusual feature of this mill – a log washer – which Mr Qin believes leads to improved chip quality and reduced chipper wear. The next conveyor transports the logs end-on to the Type PHS disc chipper.
The chips are then conveyed to a moving floor chip bin, again provided by Pallmann, which also supplied the chip screen.
In the refiner building is the Pallmann 52/54in refiner and next door is the Dieffenbacher-supplied glue kitchen.
“We have our own glue factory just for this line, making urea formaldehyde to produce boards to E1 and E2 standards,” said Mr Qin. This is housed in a separate threestorey building on the site.
Energy for the plant is supplied by Vyncke of Belgium. This and the Pallmann contracts were negotiated directly with the suppliers, as was the supply of the Steinemann sander.
The main press is a Dieffenbacher CPS with a length of 23.2m and an effective width of eight feet. Design capacity is 120- 150,000m3 a year of 4mm thick HDF.
Gaofeng has a belt cleaning system on the press to clean the stainless steel belt continuously during operation.
Mr Qin intends to purchase belt repairing equipment at a later date.
There is a Holzma Powerline HFL 66 cut-to-size plant and a Steinemann Satos eight-head sanding line.
The Holzma will be used to supply customers with cut-to-size panels as required, giving a bit more versatility to the operations at Gaofeng.
The company has taken its own route to panel handling, combining various features of the systems commonly available.
Thus it employs an overhead, manned, gantry crane with the steel pack-carrier plates characteristic of the Metso Lukki system.
GreCon supplied the combined thickness/ blow detection system, weight-per-unit area and density profile measuring systems, as well as the spark detection and extinguishing equipment.
The purpose-built production hall is well illuminated with natural light and the layout of the whole production area is very similar to that employed in Europe.
The Gaofeng Group is broadly divided into the two divisions of forestry and industrial wood products and the two are, of course, inter-dependent.
“The balance is important between the resources and the products,” confirmed Mr Qin. “We build factories where there are resources and we grow trees where we have factories; this is a ‘green’ business. And although we have no firm plans yet, we will build more lines in the future and gain more power in the market.”

One would not expect to find a Dutch Canadian running a factory in north east China,  although early March temperatures of minus 140C should not be so much of a shock to  omeone accustomed to Canadian winters.
Adrian Kuypers, president of Innovative Board Technologies (IBT), Ontario, Canada,  came to Shenyang to take charge of IBT’s joint venture project to produce MDF  doorskins for the growing Chinese market.
“The project was originally my concept, back in 1996,” said Mr Kuypers, whose  experience includes working as a design engineer and project manager for engineering  consultancies to the panel industry and running the Noranda OSB factory in Scotland. He also set up the first MDF factory in China in the early 1980s, for Fuzhou Man Made Board Company.
“At IBT, we felt that moulded decorative panels had a good future and that doorskins, as a basic product of that type, had tremendous potential in Asia, and particularly China, as well as in Europe and North America,” said Mr Kuypers.
In 1997, IBT signed an initial joint venture agreement with Shenyang Heavy Machinery Group (SHMG). To IBT’s extensive expertise in the industry, SHMG added experience in equipment design and manufacture and engineering, the construction of 16  particleboard and seven MDF plants, operational management of its own two MDF plants in Shenyang and product sales and distribution in China.
In 1999, a second joint venture agreement was signed, this time including a third partner, Shenyang Industrial Investment Company (SIIC). This new partner brought financial services, management and admin- istration expertise, as well as involvement in 27 other joint ventures in China, including one with automotive manufacturer BMW.
The factory buildings for the new line were provided by SHMG, being a former engineering works which it owned. This meant the premises had full zoning for industrial use and were provided with all necessary services and road links.
The project then suffered a setback, due to financial problems of another (now ex) partner, but the construction of the new doorskin production line was completed in March 2003, when the first board, which, to the company’s credit, was of saleable quality, was produced. Full production really commenced in September of last year.
Of course, doorskin production has a long history in North America with Jeld- Wen and Masonite as market leaders there.
Machinery for all those North American lines came from Washington Iron Works, whose presses became the standard equipment for doorskin lines all over the world.
Shendor broke with that standard and placed the contract for the press with Dieffenbacher of Germany, which, said Mr Kuypers, “came in with the best deal”.
Quality of the raw material for a moulded panel line is critical and Shendor decided to go for Japanese export quality pulp chips from Jilin Province in north east China.
They are produced from mixed hardwoods such as poplar, oak and birch. Poplar makes up a very small proportion because, although it gives a good light colour, it also gives problems with thickness swelling characteristics of the finished panel, explained Mr Kuypers.
For the other major raw material, resin, Shendor worked closely with Dynea to develop a satisfactory recipe.
“We were going to use our own resin plant from the start, but decided to go with Dynea,” said Mr Kuypers. “We have built our own plant but I decided it would be better not to try and start up a resin plant and a new doorskin plant at the same time.That may be OK for MDF production but it is trickier for doorskins.We will have our resin production plant in production before June this year.”
Another tricky area for doorskin manufacturers is the painting process and Shendor worked closely with Akzo Nobel to develop a thermoplastic primer.
The chips arrive in sacks, and loose, in open trucks. They are offloaded and pushed into  two underground hoppers from where they are metered to a screen to remove oversize chips. A bucket elevator takes accepted material to the top of the refiner building, to the  locallymade chip washer and then on to the chip bin.
The plug screw feeder, digester and refiner are all by Andritz although, unusually, the refiner came from the ex Sprout Bauer, now Andritz, works in Pennsylvania in the US. It is a 42/44in unit with a 1600kW motor.
The dryers are locally made and energy is provided by four boilers – two for steam and two for thermal oil, all fuelled mainly by coal and some wood.
“The resins we use are melamine urea formaldehyde (MUF) to give a degree of moisture resistance to the panels but, more importantly, to produce low-formaldehyde emission panels,” said Mr Kuypers.
The Dieffenbacher former has one mechanical forming head and this company also supplied all the forming and pressing line as a sub-contract. Shendor acted as its own main contractor for the project.
The hot press is an eight-daylight unit, preceded by a belt pre-press. There is a Chinese-made mat moisture detector after the forming head.
The control room is fully computerized with monitors for refining, glue mixing and drying on one side; and forming and pressing on the other.
The press loader features an electronic mat positioning system and a belt to feed the mats into the press openings mounted on rails; it can be moved sideways to facilitate maintenance and die changes.
There is also a die changing cart on the press unloader, which moves into the press and picks up the dies.
The first set of dies came from Hunts Machinery of the US, but Mr Kuypers said he had now switched to a local supplier due to the import duty.
There are two dies per press opening, giving a total of 16 doorskins per cycle. The press is guaranteed by Dieffenbacher to give a 54-second cycle, although that is in excess of Shendor’s requirements – it would equate to seven million doorskins a year and the company’s target is six million, but it gives spare capacity.
The press heating system is set up to cater for phenolic glues, if necessary, being capable of running at 260-2700C but Shendor currently runs MUF glues at around 1750C.
After press unloading, a conveyor takes the panels round to a Globe/Burelbach sawing line, grading station and sorting line.
The panels are then fed into the finishing line by vacuum lifters and pass through a pre- eater from Forest Technologies Inc as a sub-contractor to Burelbach. The spray painting booth comes next, immediately followed by two curing ovens to flash off the water immediately. The next stage is cooling to avoid warping of the panels.
An extensive testing laboratory is under the watchful eye of a chemical engineer who has extensive experience in resin technology and tests all the raw material, and sample finished panels, for quality. The recipes are critical in moulded panel production.
There is an agreement between IBT and Shendor that IBT will export at least 25% of production to gain foreign currency and to underpin new plant developments in China.
Currently, exports go to India, Pakistan, Europe and south and north America. Shendor offers five different moulding patterns and three sizes for each pattern, some of which are produced by trimming the borders of the panels.
Design capacity of the plant is six million panels a year with a density of 1,010kg/m3. This is equivalent to 100m3 a day, but the factory is ramping up to this level gradually as the market grows. Mr Kuypers anticipates achieving full production in 2006.
“Our vision for Shendor was to build doorskin warehousing in several locations and then to build five more plants in China, either owned by the company, or as majority holdings in joint ventures,” he said. “That vision is still intact; consider that Jeld-Wen, Masonite and Craft Master had about 12 or 14 production lines in North America producing 100 million doorskins a year and, eventually, China will be a bigger building materials market than the United States.
“We forecast a consumption of 350 to 400 million doors in China by 2010 and 220 million by 2005.”

In common with many companies now involved in the Chinese MDF industry, Suichang Luyuan Wood Co Ltd started out with a wet-process hardboard line in Suichang County.
That was back in 1985. Ten years later, the company built its first MDF line, using a 15-daylight Shanghai Wood Based Panel Machinery Co Ltd press. It followed this with another two lines of similar size from the same supplier, one in 1996 and one in 1997.
These three lines gave the company a total annual capacity of around 150,000m3. Like many other Chinese MDF producers, Suichang Luyuan realised that, if it was to be truly competitive going forward, it needed to build a European-made continuous press line.
The company then bought a Greenfield site in a newly established industrial area in Suichang County in an area of wooded mountains in Zhejiang Province close to China’s eastern seaboard. The name Luyuan, literally translated, means ‘green source’.
The next step was to place the contract for the new MDF line and Suichang Luyuan chose Siempelkamp as the main contractor to supply the press line, while Siempelkamp’s subsidiary, Sicoplan, had the coordinating function, designing the plant layout and controlling the interfaces between the various items of equipment. The front end of the line was a separate contract for Andritz, while Steinemann had a separate contract for the sanding, and Anthon for the cut-to-size plant. Civil works began on the site in March 2003 and the project was completed by November of that year. The first board was produced on December 10, 2003, only nine months after the first hole was dug.
As the new continuous line came into production, Luyuan sold one of its three multi-daylight lines and moved the other two to new locations in the neighbouring county.
Those two lines are rated at 100,000m3 a year in total and the new Siempelkamp ContiRoll line adds another 150,000m3 at full capacity.
But that is not the whole story. The Suichang company is part of the larger Luyuan Group, headquartered in Hangzhou City, Anhui Province, which has 10 branch factories and a total of 11 MDF production lines in different provinces of China, mainly to the south of the Yangtse river. All the factories were built new by the group, rather than being purchased as going concerns.
Total production capacity for the group today is around 700 to 800,000m3 a year, although 2003 saw a total production of 480,000m3, because only seven of the lines were in production at that time.
The company claims to be number one in China in terms of capacity, although Mr Guan Qe Qin, general manager of Suichang and a vice-president of the company, admits that that is a fluid situation in China’s fastgrowing MDF industry.
What he is sure of is the fact that, in Suichang County, Suichang Luyuan is number three in output value for all industrial enterprises.
The well-stocked woodyard holds the pine and mixed hardwood logs, mainly in the form of branches and other small diameter roundwood. Sawmill residues are used only for fuel.
A log grab feeds the roundwood to a locally-made drum debarker from which the bark is conveyed to the fuel storage area.
The chipping line was supplied by Andritz Oy of Finland, utilising an Andritz Oy HQ-chipper while the refiner, from Andritz of Austria, is a 52/54in model. After chipping, the chips are carried by a covered conveyor to a concrete chip silo and then to a locally-made chip screen to remove oversize and fines.
They then travel to the top of the refining building where they are washed thoroughly before entering the refining process.
The dryer came from Büttner of Germany and the gluing system from Imal of Italy, both as part of the Siempelkamp scope of supply. Sifting, forming, pre-press, continuous press, board trimming, cooling and stacking were all supplied by Siempelkamp, with subsidiary SHS supplying the latter components.
With thin board running at high speed, the roller conveyor is an important component to avoid the board jumping as it comes out of the press and so SHS supplied these components which might otherwise have been supplied locally.
All on-the-line quality control and monitoring systems were supplied as part of the same contract, as was the bag filter and fibre transport system for the forming station. The forming line has no scalping, leading to reduced operator cost because there is no need for a vacuum transport system to remove the scalped fibre. The scalping function in this ‘Starformer’ has been replaced by an equalising roller to give even distribution of the mat.
It also removes the problems of pre-cure of the resin during recirculation – possibly several times in a conventional, scalped system.
There is a Weko mat damping unit before the press.
“This is the fastest line in China, capable of running at 1300mm per second,” said Mrs Ma Hangqing, manager with Siempelkamp’s Beijing office. “Even when making 2mm board, it can produce 700m3 a day of very good quality, flat boards.”
The ContiRoll press is housed in an enclosure to trap and extract fumes and is 23.6m long and eight feet wide. It is equipped with a flexible infeed enabling it to quickly achieve high-speed production.
To achieve this flexibility, both platens are 60mm thick at the infeed, rather than the normal 100mm, and the radius of curvature can be adjusted in the plus or minus direction. The principle is to achieve a fast pressure increase in order to produce thin board at high speed without incurring blisters due to trapped air in the mat. Pressure can, in fact, be varied along the infeed section in a pressure ‘wave’, if required, explained Mrs Ma.
A variable position infeed conveyor also facilitates this process, going further into the press opening when thinner board is being pressed. This is in order to position the mat in exactly the right place so that it receives heat and pressure equally on both sides simultaneously, thus avoiding pre-cure of the resin on one side – a potential problem if one side of the mat touches the hot belt before the other.
Boards exit the press to go to two star coolers before being taken to intermediate storage.
A Steinemann Satos eight-head sander is available for panel sanding and there is an Anthon angular cut-to-size plant which takes books of up to 60 panels of 2.5mm thickness.
The central control room is conveniently located between the main production line and the refiner room, with windows on each side of the control room giving a clear view of either area to supplement the comprehensive computer real-time graphics and the CCTV monitors.
The region has a stable supply of electrical power, generated by hydro-electric power stations, said Mr Guan.
Energy for the MDF production line is generated by a GTS Energy plant supplying steam, thermal oil heating and the flue gas for drying. This American based company has had some success in supplying energy plants for the new wave of MDF lines in China, beating some strong European competition.
Process water is treated in a biochemical system to meet Chinese water quality standards, and much of it is recycled into the MDF production process.
Exhaust air is filtered in a bag filter system which is a mix of locally-made and imported equipment.
New mills in China attach increasing importance to quality control and to protecting their considerable investment. Suichang Luyuan chose GreCon as the supplier for both on-the-line quality control, with density and thickness measurement systems, weight-per-unit-area gauges and blister detection; and for spark detection and extinguishing systems throughout the plant.
The new Siempelkamp line has given Suichang Luyuan a whole new market area on which to concentrate. The old multi-daylight lines were only able to produce 9mm and thicker boards, but the new line adds thinner panels to the range.
Thus the group now offers thicknesses of 2.5, 2.7, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, 6.0, 8.0, 12.0, 15.0 and 25mm panels. Around 80 to 90% of production from the new continuous line is under 6mm thickness.
Densities offered are 820-860kg/m3 for 12mm and 15mm board, 760kg/m3 for 18mm and thicker and 860-880kg/m3 for thin board.
The principle resin used is urea formaldehyde (UF), but for grade one board, melamine urea formaldehyde (MUF) resin is used to produce a moisture resistant E1 grade.
Currently, Luyuan only supplies the domestic market, all over China, with the main customers being engaged in the furniture industry, domestic decoration and some high-grade packaging of consumer products.
“At present we just manufacture raw MDF board, but in future we will maybe add some downstream products,” said Mr Guan.
An advantage for MDF in China is that it is exempt from the normal 17% VAT because it uses ‘waste’ wood, explained Mrs Ma. By waste in this context, she means branches, small diameter and crooked logs, forest thinnings and so on. In other words, wood that is not usable for lumber.
Larger logs incur VAT and this could be one obstacle to the development of an OSB industry based on fresh wood in China.
The limiting factor on MDF production in China is always the availability of wood to make the fibre but Mr Guan is confident that his factory faces no such problems in an unusually well-wooded region.
“We selected this area for the new factory because of the raw material supply and I don’t see any problem,” he said. “This is a mountainous area with plenty of wood, mostly from natural forest and some from plantations. The rainfall in this area is high and trees grow well by natural regeneration.”

The Weihua group has built a lot of continuous production lines in the last few years and one of its most recent is in Liaoning Province, as Mike Botting reports

ShaanXi Zhong Xing Timber Co Ltd is a privately-owned  business with four MDF lines, a 15-year history in the business and some interesting plans for the future. Mike Botting visited its latest line near the world-famous city of Xian

German machinery supplier Wemhöner Surface Technologies first entered the Chinese market in 1983. It formed a local sales company in 2004 and in 2007 opened its own factory in Changzhou. Mike Botting visited that facility

The Liren Wood Industry Group (LR Group) has an annual production capacity of 720,000m3 and was an early entrant to the Chinese MDF industry. Mike Botting visited its latest, rather unusual, line in Jiangshan City