According to primary findings gathered by The Ply Reporter, an overall drop is witnessed among plywood, laminate industry sales turnovers in FY 2020-21. Although the numbers do not have a structured basis yet as majority of companies are yet to reach to accuracy, still the sales data revealed during primary survey of The Ply Reporter points to around 15% drop in sales revenues for the plywood-laminate sector. For many companies the drop is significantly bigger by 20% or above.
The plywood-door industry, being unorganised in nature, an accurate aggregate is not possible but a 25-30 percent of revenue loss due to lockdown is a reality’ expressed by owners and verified by trade, varying factory to factory for plywood sector alone. In HPL the sales numbers have performed better but is also include value enhancement due to steep price jump after January 2021.
This is the result despite government making all efforts to support demand with stimulus economic packages, moratorium, loan top-up, low interest rates, bigger spend on infrastructural budget etc. All these things indeed helped domestic wood and decorative panel industry too, yet it fell short to last year numbers.
The obvious reason is due to shadow of Covid 19 pandemic, led by Lockdown imposed in country 24th March 2020. The scenario became severe with Lockdown -1, followed by Lockdown 2 and 3 and growing number of positive cases across the world. The uncertainty loomed over entire business community, that restricted movement of material and manpower for plywood, laminate industries. Since many of the unorganised industries are heavily dependent on manual working due to which smaller industries had hardly achieved their 75% of sales revenues compared to previous year.
The speedy recovery in plywood and laminates sector was notedonly after second quarter i.e September, yet the recovery has been phenomenal and extraordinary. Despite of falling short compared to previous year turnovers for six months, yet falling short by around 15% is a remarkable recovery for plywood-laminate sector.
On the contrary, MDF and Particle Boards manufacturing companies have registered growth of approximately 10 percent because they had successfully increased their capacity utilization. Some MDF and PB segment viewed that Covid proved a blessing for them because they were struggling in previous year and hardly can they utilize their capacity
The Ply Reporter study reflects that ‘due to 70 % of Indians staying in rural and semi-urban area’ these markets have not been that affected due to pandemic, hence there is good demand come from these areas. Besides, Agriculture output are reported to better in this Financial Year, which also supports business and economy. Ply Reporter is waiting for Financial results of organize wood panel brands, which would come in next month.