A status and development direction of lumbering industry in Korea

The government defines ecc-friendly lumbering industry as its essential challenge for fostering of forest business and raising of its competitiveness and aims at 17% of wood self-supply ratio in 2017 from 10% of it in 2005, as well as promotes stable supply system of wood, improvement of timer production and distribution system, industrial application of wood resources, supply expansion of lumbering industry, credibility of domestic materials, and development of processing technologies. However, the financial difficulty has been deteriorated because of economic slump and export limitation of countries with wood resources and therefore total output of lumbering industry was reduced by 7% to 2500 billion KRW in 2008 than that in 2007 and the number of general lumbering companies was also reduced by 10% from 674 in 2007 to 609 in 2008. Although researches on lumbering companies and wood industry include research on development measures of wood industry and analysis of environmental factors affecting wood supply, recently these researches are not active so much and there is few study on management cases for lumbering companies by regions. Thus in this study investigation in order to seek problems on management and future developmental direction was conducted against lumbering enterprises located in Gapyeong-gun and Pocheon-si that have larger areas of artificial forest with Korean white pine and larch compared with other regions in Gyeonggi Province. As a result, it was found that there were some factors making management of lumbering enterprises more difficult, including increase of items substituting wood, outworn lumbering facility, decrease of demand for lumbering product from economic slump as well as raise of wood price and labor costs. Therefore, it was identified that for enhancement of public beneficial function of forest through fostering of lumbering enterprises and expansion of domestic material consumption, and production of large diameter log with good quality, it was needed to prepare various support plans such as tax reduction and exemption and financial support for lumbering enterprise.