1. Why this sector in Inner Mongolia deserves a separate look

When people think of wood processing, the mind jumps to the bamboo regions of the south or the panel clusters of the north. Inner Mongolia rarely makes that list. Yet it is precisely Inner Mongolia that lays bare the sharpest contradiction in this industry: when a place once lived by felling trees, and felling is then banned, how is its wood-processing industry supposed to survive.

The wood, bamboo, rattan, palm and straw products industry is a plain category in any classification, turning out panels, furniture fittings, flooring and disposable items. In Inner Mongolia its peculiarity lies on the raw-material end, where the past decade has brought an almost forced structural switch. Natural forests may no longer be cut, yet the processing capacity, the skilled workers and the parks all remain; meanwhile the desert-control shrubs raised to fix sand, and the Russian timber arriving at the border ports, are filling the feedstock gap.

The Tianxia Gongchang Industry Research Institute singles out Inner Mongolia's wood-processing sector for exactly this reason. It is not a leader by output value, but it is an excellent window onto how a resource constraint forces a traditional processing industry to find new feedstock and a new way out. This report endorses no company; it simply sorts out the public record of this industry's origins, geography and present pressures.

2. The logging ban: a pause button pressed on an old forest region

To understand Inner Mongolia's wood processing, there is no getting around the Greater Khingan range.

Development of the Inner Mongolia Greater Khingan forest region dates to the 1950s. In 1952 the bureau's first head led a team into Yakeshi to organise development, and that autumn the first felling call rang out at the Tulihe forestry works. For decades afterwards, this place was known as "China's capital of forest industry" for its early start, and an entire generation lived off chainsaws and logs.

The turn came in 2015. According to Xinhua, on 1 April 2015 the last commercially felled larch fell at Wulikuma in Genhe, and the Inner Mongolia Greater Khingan forest region completely halted commercial logging of natural forests. The weight of that ban can be felt in a few figures: 1.1 million cubic metres of timber cut each year stopped, a cumulative 5.83 million cubic metres of foregone output, and a reduction of forest-resource consumption of about 10.65 million cubic metres. For an old forest region that lived on logs, the source of feedstock was shut off in one stroke.

The most direct shock landed on the wood-processing chain. With no more logs, traditional sawing and panel making lost their local feedstock, two hundred thousand forestry workers had to turn from fellers into forest guardians, and the whole industry was forced off the old "fell-and-process" road. The region then redirected itself toward eco-tourism, the under-forest economy and carbon sinks, none of which depend on felling. According to China's National Development and Reform Commission, the forestry carbon-sink project of the affiliated Chuoer enterprise was registered with an overseas registry in 2016, with a first issuance of 380,000 tonnes of emission reductions, achieving the first carbon-sink transaction by a state forest region. This is a road entirely different from traditional wood processing.

3. Sand-willow and Caragana: a feedstock grown out of desert control

If the Greater Khingan end represents an ebbing of raw material, then the desertification control of central and western Inner Mongolia has, at the other end, grown an entirely new wood-processing feedstock: sand-fixing shrubs.

In the arid and semi-arid west of Inner Mongolia, shrubs such as sand-willow and Caragana are planted across vast areas to fix sand and block wind. They share one key biological trait: they must be coppiced every three to five years, that is, the branches cut back close to the ground, or they wither; coppicing instead spurs fresh shoots and rejuvenation. According to China's National Forestry and Grassland Administration, the area of Caragana and sand-willow shrub needing coppicing in Inner Mongolia runs to hundreds of millions of mu, with about a third cut on rotation each year, which means a steady, large output of shrub branchwood.

This branchwood was once fit only for burning. But the branches of sand-willow and Caragana are high in fibre and tough, and after crushing, modification, gluing and pressing they can be made into particleboard and other reconstituted panels, and further into reconstituted wood, wood-plastic composites and lightweight engineered materials. A shrub planted to fix sand thus turns from a by-product of an ecological project into feedstock on a panel line.

Ordos is the most representative stop on this road. According to China's wood-industry media, Ordos once launched a full-chain sand-willow profile project with total investment of about 1.5 billion yuan, planning to build roughly 500,000 cubic metres of modified sand-willow product capacity over five years and to scale up reconstituted sand-willow wood, sand-willow profiles and particleboard. Yet the same source candidly notes that, hit by a depressed market, all local particleboard processors except the leading East Da Group were once idled, evidence that this sand-willow road has not been an easy one.

Beyond panels, the other outlet for shrub branchwood is biomass energy. Sand-willow and other waste wood, after crushing, drying and pelletising, become biomass pellet fuel with a high calorific value, sold into Shanxi, Shaanxi, Hebei and Ningxia. Panel making and energy making, running in parallel, form the basic pattern of shrub-wood use in Inner Mongolia.

4. The ports: turning Russian timber into panels on the spot

Inner Mongolia's third feedstock thread comes from the border ports to the north.

Inner Mongolia borders Russia and Mongolia and holds several ports including Manzhouli and Erenhot. Manzhouli is China's largest land port, and large volumes of Russian timber enter through it. According to wood-industry information platforms, among the Russian timber imported via Manzhouli, Scots pine makes up a high share, once close to ninety percent, alongside larch, white pine, fish-scale pine and a little white birch.

In recent years the ports have shifted from simple transit toward "landing processing," letting imported timber be turned into panels, composite door-and-window stock and pallets right in the port parks, keeping the added value local. According to Xinhua, the Erenhot port has run a "cross-border mutual trade plus landing processing" model since 2023, with cumulative mutual-trade value of 15.31 billion yuan by January 2025, of which landing-processing trade reached 8.42 billion yuan. Manzhouli, for its part, is advancing an integrated "port cargo plus park landing processing" model, where imported-timber processing has taken on scale and cluster form, with a cluster of firms producing Russian logs, panels and larch-and-Scots-pine composite door-and-window stock.

This port leg has nothing to do with local resources; it rests on location and corridor. Together with the ebb of the Greater Khingan and the shrub-wood of the centre and west, it forms the unusual "three sources coexisting" feedstock structure of Inner Mongolia's wood processing today: at one end the halted local logs, at another the shrubs grown from sand control, and at a third the imported timber arriving through the ports.

5. Challenges: switching feedstock is not so smooth

Gathering these three threads, one must also see honestly the real pressures facing Inner Mongolia's wood processing. Most stem from the same root: the violent switch of feedstock structure is itself full of friction.

The first pressure is that the economics of the new feedstock are not yet fully worked out. Shrub wood such as sand-willow and Caragana is thin per stem, highly dependent on manual harvesting, and spread over a wide collection radius; pressing it into panels able to compete head-on on price with ordinary reconstituted board demands no small commitment in process and equipment. The earlier widespread idling of Ordos particleboard plants shows that this road faces real tests of cost and sales on the market end.

The second pressure comes from the market and from sameness. Reconstituted panels, flooring and disposable wood items have low technical thresholds and many producing regions nationwide; Inner Mongolia sits far from the main furniture and building-material consuming markets, and long-haul transport raises costs further. In a price war at the low-to-mid end, Inner Mongolia's regions hold no advantage.

The third pressure is the external dependence of port processing. Landing processing keeps the added value local, but the feedstock lifeline is held on the import side: once Russian timber supply, exchange rates or cross-border logistics waver, port processors are hit first, a risk no processing cluster reliant on a single import source can escape.

6. The Institute's assessment

Gathering these threads, the wood, bamboo, rattan, palm and straw products industry of Inner Mongolia presents not an output-value story but a wholesale migration of feedstock structure: the Greater Khingan's log supply shut by an ecological red line, the central-western sand-control shrubs pushed onto panel lines, the northern ports processing imported timber on the spot. Ebb, rebirth and borrowed passage, all happening at once within a single province.

For the upstream that supplies this industry: the adhesive and modifier makers for reconstituted panels and wood, the equipment builders for crushing and pressing shrub wood, and the woodworking-machinery and hardware suppliers needed for port landing processing, Inner Mongolia is a market whose structure is being rearranged and whose demand points are migrating. Customers are scattered along the sand-control frontlines of Ordos and Alxa, and clustered in the port parks of Manzhouli and Erenhot, too inefficient to canvass one by one. A sales team supplying these wood processors upstream can use Tianxia Gongchang to filter precisely along the two dimensions of region and industry, pulling up directly the factory roster and decision-maker contacts of Inner Mongolia's wood, bamboo, rattan, palm and straw products industry, turning customer development from a needle in a haystack into following a map.

The Institute's assessment is this: the interest of this industry in Inner Mongolia lies not in how big it can grow, but in whether it can turn the passive matter of a forced feedstock switch into an active road. Whether sand-willow can earn its place as panel stock, and whether the ports' imported timber can hold steady, will decide not merely the books of a few factories, but whether an old forest region, after the chainsaws fell silent, can still keep working with wood. The answer is not yet fully written, but the direction admits no turning back.

Data sources

  • Tianxia Gongchang (factory roster and industry data for Inner Mongolia's wood, bamboo, rattan, palm and straw products industry)
  • Xinhua News Agency, Xinhuanet: coverage of the decade since the logging ban in the Inner Mongolia Greater Khingan forest region; cross-border mutual trade and landing-processing data of the Erenhot port
  • Economic Information Daily (Xinhua): the largest state forest region facing the pains of the logging halt
  • National Forestry and Grassland Administration: coppicing of sand-fixing shrubs and composite use of shrub wood; diversified use of shrub resources in desertification control in Ordos, Inner Mongolia
  • National Development and Reform Commission: market-based trading practice of forestry carbon-sink products by Inner Mongolia Chuoer Forest Industry Co., Ltd.
  • China wood-industry information platforms: Ordos reconstituted sand-willow wood and particleboard industry; market situation of Russian timber imported through the Manzhouli port
  • Yakeshi Municipal People's Government portal: city profile