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Friday, July 08, 2005
Cebu wood product manufacturers hurt by cheap furniture imports
Aside from the rising cost of raw materials, Cebu local makers of wood products are significantly hurt by cheap furniture imports that serve as a threat to the local wood industry.
That’s what Alfonso Yap, president of the Wood Producers Association of Cebu (Wopac) and general manager of Tradelink Industries, said yesterday during the opening of Manufacturing Technology Cebu 2005.
Yap said the supply of wood they use mostly come from areas outside Cebu, like Bohol, Davao and the other parts of Mindanao and Visayas.
Wopac company members sell various wood finished products, like furniture, wooden doors, windows, table, woodcraft, among many others, to the market in Cebu and to buyers coming from other places, like Mindanao.
Patrick Lawrence Tan, managing director of Global-Link Marketing and Management Services Inc. and organizer of the event, lamented the country’s lack of industrial machines.
“We are becoming a trading hub for industrial products. But we’ve never produced and exported them to other countries. We produce what we’ve already been producing. Furniture and fashion accessories, for example, have no threats. But when it comes to producing machines ... it’s cheaper to import than to produce, so everybody buys from abroad,” he said.
The three-day event incorporates Woodmach Cebu 2005’s 8th International Woodworking, Furniture-making, Machinery, Furnishing and Accessories Exhibition together with the Total Office Products and Services Show Cebu 2005 at the Grand Convention Center of Cebu.
Wopac, one of the organizers of the exhibit, is composed of 28 member companies in Cebu. (ALC)
(July 8, 2005 issue)
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