Advancing enhanced wood manufacturing industries in Laos and Australia - PML Easbeam Study Tour

This study tour was undertaken as a component of VALTIP 3 Activity 3.2 of Objective 3 (Develop and conduct formal and informal training programs for industry) in the ACIAR co-funded aid project FST/2016/151 Advancing enhanced wood manufacturing industries in Laos and Australia. The aim of this Study tour was to expose the new project partner PML Easbeam Company to engineered wood product manufacturing, potential markets and industries operating in Australia. The PML Easbeam company is a subsidiary of the PML company and was established in July 2019. The PML Company was successful in tendering for the construction of an add-on facility at the National University of Laos to contain equipment for veneer-based product production research. Subsequently, as an established construction company, the company saw the potential and were interested in engineered wood products made from wood veneer, in particular laminated veneer lumber (LVL) structural beams. At the point of writing this report, PML Easbeam is in the process of setting up an LVL plant in Vientiane to manufacture LVL beams using certified, plantation eucalyptus material for domestic and international markets. The PML Easbeam Company financed the study tour themselves. The expected mid to long-term outcome of this exposure is to facilitate the uptake of veneer-based processing and product development in Laos PDR. Previous research conducted during ACIAR co-funded aid project: FST/2008/039 Enhancement of veneer products from acacia and eucalypt plantations in Vietnam and Australia, identified spindleless-lathes as the most likely evolutionary technology to improve the productivity of processing small plantation-logs in Lao PDR. The veneer processing sector in Vietnam is well established and involves 4,200 wood processing and trading enterprises and in the order of thousands of household businesses employing over 300,000 labourers operating in over 300 traditional wood-processing villages (To and Quang, 2012). During surveys of small rural areas of Northern Vietnam, Ozarska et al. (2015) identified that exporters of peeled veneer to China and India cannot meet the demand of these countries. Therefore, this undersupply could provide potential export markets of processed veneer from small plantation-logs currently growing in Lao PDR.