Perhaps the only half-bright silver lining for softwood plywood during the ongoing economic downturn is that thanks to competition from OSB, plywood producers for the past 20 years have been forced to diversify away from structural markets that rely on housing and non-residential construction—economic activities that are currently flat on their backs, figuratively speaking.
Yet while the softwood plywood segment hasn’t seen as drastic decreases in production as OSB, which is more reliant on homebuilding and other structural markets and dropped close to 60% in North America from 2005 through 2009, plywood producers have also seen a big output reduction.