Romanian beech through customs · 2025
Beech is the commonest tree in Romania's forests, covering almost a third of their area. What crosses the border leaves almost entirely sawn into boards: in 2025 a cubic metre of sawn beech sold abroad for €417, and 56% of the money came from China. A tonne of wooden-frame chairs brought in €4,881, 9.1 times as much as a tonne of sawn beech.
What Romania received, on average, for an exported tonne in 2025, from firewood to office furniture. Tap a board for detail.
length: € per exported tonnethicker: bigger exports, in money€ per imported tonneimport dearer than export
€ per tonne · exports 2025
sold: €109 million · 261,446 m³ · €417/m³ · €538/t
bought: €9.1 million · 20,004 m³ · €454/m³ · €591/t
Mostly goes to: China 56%, Egypt 9%, Lebanon 8%.
Mostly comes from: Germany 36%, Ukraine 20%, Slovakia 18%.
Of every 10 m³ of sawn beech China bought in 2025, nearly 3 came from Romania.
Two things show at a glance. Low down, for sawn beech and fibreboard, the orange import mark falls beyond the end of the board: the tonne Romania buys costs more than the tonne it sells. Higher up, among furniture, the mark usually falls under the board, short of its end: Romania sells the tonne dearer than it buys it. The exceptions near the top are fitted kitchens and sofas.
Where Romania's imports of the chosen object come from, where what Romania makes goes, and what the tonne is worth each way. The starting point is a tonne of sawn beech: €538/t on export.
×9.1 against a tonne of sawn beech (€538/t)
sold: €48 million · 9,886 tonnes · €4,881/t
bought: €14 million · 3,800 tonnes · €3,789/t
Mostly goes to: the United States 12%, the Netherlands 12%, Germany 10%.
Mostly comes from: Viet Nam 37%, China 20%, Bulgaria 8%.
The familiar story says Romania sells its wood raw and cheap and buys furniture back dear. For wooden furniture, the figures say the opposite. In 2025 Romania exported €1.03 billion of wooden furniture and wooden-frame seating and imported €0.48 billion. The tonne it sold was worth €3,443, the tonne it bought €2,189.
It holds for most products taken one by one, too: bedroom furniture sold at €2,885/t and was bought at €1,942/t; wooden-frame chairs brought €4,881/t against €3,789/t for imports. Up on the top rungs, Romania usually sells dearer than it buys. The real gap is elsewhere: at the bottom, where wood leaves barely processed, and in a few finishing products.
The whole of customs chapter 94, furniture and related goods, shows an even bigger surplus (€2.76 billion exported, €1.90 billion imported), but it also holds car-seat parts, lamps and mattresses. This page counts wooden furniture only.
Beech named as such in customs leaves almost entirely as sawn timber: €109 million in 2025 at €538/t, against €0.7 million for logs. 56% of the value went to China, followed by Egypt and Lebanon. Seen from China's own customs, Romania is its largest supplier of sawn beech: 29% of the cubic metres it imported in 2025, ahead of Germany; in 2015 the share was 43%. Sawn oak left at €553/m³ against beech at €417/m³: even among boards, beech is the cheap species.
Fibreboard, MDF and hardboard, splits in two. Plain, unworked board leaves: €90 million of exports at €357/t, against €12 million of imports. Worked or coated board comes in: Romania bought €119 million of it at €746/t and sold €68 million at €583/t. For laminate flooring on MDF the gap is almost total: imports of €40 million, mostly from Germany 48%, Poland 28%, against exports of €0.1 million.
Fitted kitchens are the furniture product Romania buys far more of than it sells: imports of €33 million at €2,156/t, against exports of €7.0 million at €1,518/t. They come mostly from Germany 24%, Poland 23%, Italy 20%. Other kitchen furniture, by contrast, are a top rung of exports: €4,648/t.
In 2014 a cubic metre of sawn beech left at €257 on average. By 2025 it reached €417, 1.6 times more in current euros. Over the same years the quantity sold fell from about 658,000 m³ to 261,000 m³. Beech logs, by contrast, barely appear in trade: in 2025 their exports totalled €0.7 million, set against €109 million for sawn timber. The beech hardly ever leaves round; it leaves sliced into boards.
The data come from Comext, Eurostat's customs statistics (dataset DS-045409, extracted November 2026), with Romania as the reporting country. For each product the page takes the value in euros and the weight, for exports and imports, in 2025, the latest complete year available on 6 November 2026. The price per tonne is the ratio of the two. For logs, sawn timber and parquet the page also uses the second unit in the customs classification: cubic metres and square metres.
Prices per tonne blend grades and qualities within the same customs code, and for furniture the weight includes parts that are not wood: fabric, foam, fittings. The rungs are therefore compared as values of the same customs flow, not as the value of the wood inside one object. Beech named as such appears in the statistics only for logs and sawn timber; the higher rungs (boards, parquet, furniture) group all species, because customs does not separate them. Fibreboard is split by detailed customs code into plain board (not mechanically worked or surface-covered) and worked or coated board; laminate flooring on MDF is counted separately. Wooden furniture means codes 9401 61, 9401 69 and 9403 30–60; office furniture (9403 30) is the dearest rung per tonne but one of the smallest by value.
Romania's share of China's sawn-beech imports comes from China's own customs declarations (UN Comtrade, code 4407 92, cubic metres). The chapter 44 and 94 totals were compared with Romania's National Institute of Statistics (TEMPO tables EXP101E and EXP102D): for 2025, exports differ by less than 0.1% and imports by less than 1%.
The share of beech comes from Romania's National Forest Inventory (results published in 2016): beech covers 31% of the country's 6.9 million hectares of forest. All of Romania's beech forests lie in the Carpathian beech region, which the network of World Heritage beech-forest sites (europeanbeechforests.org) describes as the largest occurrence of beech forests in Europe. On the domestic price of firewood see The price of firewood, and on the forest around the reader's own place, The forest near you.