European Producers of Laminate Flooring Targets Turkish Market…
Turkey is Europe’s second largest MDF producer and the biggest consumer of laminate flooring. In particular, German producers having laminate flooring production of 200 million m2 annually, due to the decline in demand in Europe, increased the pressure for export to the Turkish market.
This increase in exports of laminate flooring from Europe is clearly seen in the import statistics reports issued by Turkish Statistical Institute.
Assuming that the Turkish market will be the same in terms of volume in year 2012 compared to the previous year, imports increased to 38-40 %. At the end of 2012, imports of laminate flooring from Europe, is expected to reach 38-40 million m2. The most important factor in this increase is the low priced and low quality than domestic production level, being imported from Europe.
Turkish producers of laminate flooring has enough capacity to meet the total demand of the local market. To compensate the deviation from budget, efforts have been made by local producers to create new export markets, but the result was not very successful due to pressure from European and Chinese products .
Moreover, the fact that round wood prices in Turkey are two times more expensive than European prices puts the local producers in a lower position in international competition. For this reason, it is almost imposible to fight against imported laminate flooring.
Looking at the specifications of the products which are are imported from abroad, significant quality differences between domestic laminate flooring products are observed. For example, imported 8 mm thickness vary between 7.6 to 7.8 mm.
Many of the dealers selling local manufacturers’ products in the market, have lost competitiveness in a serious loss of sales. Some dealers could not stand this unfair competition and stopped selling or some made sacrifices on profitability and tried to survive.
Unfortunately with the present cost structures, the local producers can not make price adjustments to help their dealers for becoming more competitive.