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Access Pacific lands major French softwood contract

by Diana Burns

The All Blacks and some clever marketing helped New Zealand timber company Access Pacific (APL) to land a major deal with the world’s largest trader in hardwood timber, DLH - but it was no easy task.

The Kiwi company had to convince DLH to look beyond the forests - in this case, the hardwood forests of Asia and Brazil - to see the trees - the softwood forests of New Zealand.

Access Pacific had to persuade the giant importer DLH that its New Zealand softwood timbers are not only highly durable (with a 25 year guarantee against termites and decay), they are also defect-free and come from environmentally sustainable forests.

It has succeeded, landing a deal worth over NZ$4 million a year - and likely to grow.

DLH is the largest timber hardwood trader in the world, with a turnover in France alone of NZ$124 million.

Based in Denmark, DLH is one of the top five importers in France, and it was the homebuilding and DIY market there that Access Pacific identified.

“We went to DLH with a proposal for high-grade New Zealand pine products, treated and preserved to European standards and with the FSC (forest stewardship certification). No one in northern Europe could touch what we were offering”, says Daniel Gudsell, APL’s Marketing Director.

“Despite that, it was hard to convince DLH of the benefits - they were suspicious of softwoods.”

The economic downturn of 2009 worked to APL’s advantage, says Gudsell. It was able to convince DLH that it could offer a mid-range product from New Zealand, with high-range benefits.

Strategic Advice

With the support of NZTE, APL partnered with a French company, Global Wood.

“NZTE provided strategic advice on choosing a distributor - we knew it would be key for APL to partner with an importer”, says Alice Bourrouet, NZTE’s Market Development Manager in France.

“I gave them a list of trade associations in order to find the importers, and we constantly sent market intelligence to them.”