ASIA

A biomass company expands pallet production with new sawmills that bring better return on investment (ROI) than traditional machinery.

This family operated sawmill in Terengganu, Malaysia shows how even small companies can benefit from modern and more efficient sawmilling machinery.

At the base of Mt. Fuji in Japan, world-renowned woodworker Tak Yoshino creates custom, handcrafted chairs that promote proper and healthy posture through the practice of Zen. As a result of his chairs receiving worldwide acclaim and an increasing number of woodworkers learning Japanese carpentry from Tak, he is currently building a woodworking school with sustainably harvested timber from his own forest.

A modern pallet factory replaced two vertical bandsaws with one Wood-Mizer resaw and doubled its sawing productivity. “We have customers all over the world that come to us with their needs, and we design pallets to those exact specifications,” says Pichit Chiamcharoen, the manager of Pallet Maker Group Co. “We have produced hundreds of variations to meet our customers’ requirements.

In the East Coast region of Malaysia, in the State of Kelantan, just outside of the town of Kota Bharu, Mohd Nazmie lives with his family. He’s a schoolteacher. And he’s a woodworker and sawmiller. He salvages trees that otherwise would have been burned. He produces and sells live-edge furniture for friends and local clients. Thanks to a daring investment in an LT15 sawmill, he has opened up a whole niche industry to himself.