China is the largest importer of wood in the world, and for sawn softwood — pine, spruce and larch boards grouped under customs code HS 4407 — Russia is its single biggest supplier. When Western markets closed to Russian wood in 2022, that eastward tilt became the dominant story of the whole trade.
The world's largest wood buyer
China's construction, furniture and packaging industries run on imported wood — its own forests cannot supply domestic demand. Across logs, lumber and panels it is comfortably the top global importer. Within softwood lumber specifically, Russian sawnwood has for years been the largest single origin, moving by rail across the land border and by sea from the Far East and the Baltic.
Why the flow shifted east
Two policy shocks reshaped the map:
- From January 2022, Russia banned the export of unprocessed softwood logs, pushing the industry toward sawn and further-processed goods — exactly the HS 4407 lumber, HS 4409 profiles and HS 4412 plywood that trade today.
- Through 2022, the EU, US, UK, Japan and others closed their markets to Russian wood. Volumes that once went west were redirected — overwhelmingly to China, with secondary growth into Central Asia, the Gulf, Egypt and the wider Middle East and North Africa.
The net effect: a concentrated, price-competitive flow of Russian softwood into China, and a search for new homes for the grades the West used to take.
Lumber, not logs
Because raw logs can no longer leave the country, what crosses the border now is value-added: kiln-dried and rough sawn timber, planed profiles, and plywood. For a buyer that means more consistent, mill-graded product; for Russian mills it means the margin stays at origin rather than in a foreign sawmill.
Where plywood and pellets go
China is the anchor for softwood lumber, but it is not the whole market. China makes much of its own plywood, so Russian birch plywood (HS 4412) flows more strongly to Egypt, the Gulf, Central Asia and other MENA markets. Wood pellets and briquettes (HS 4401) follow their own demand — industrial and residential heating across the Mediterranean, the Gulf and Asia. A trading desk that only watches China misses half the picture.
What it means for a buyer or a mill
If you buy softwood lumber in China, Russian origin is not a niche alternative — it is the mainstream, and pricing it well is simply pricing the market. If you sell plywood, pellets or specialty grades, the opportunity sits beyond China, in the MENA and Central Asian corridors that absorbed the redirected volume. Either way, the post-2022 map rewards whoever can move graded product reliably along these new routes — which is the corridor we built Taiga Commodities around.
Sources & note: figures are indicative, drawn from UN Comtrade mirror data (partner-reported trade), ITTO market reporting and industry press, and rounded. Trade statistics are revised over time and Russian reporting is incomplete in several datasets; treat these as orders of magnitude, not audited totals.