Wood-Mizer Service & Support in Asia

Asia’s huge timber resources support billions of people with livelihoods and such essentials as homes and furniture. Asian timber can sustain profitable businesses for centuries if it is managed wisely. Wood-Mizer’s range of affordable, quality sawmills is ideal for businesses looking to improve their profitability, reduce labour requirements and lessen the environmental impact of their timber processing.

Today, Wood-Mizer is equipping the modern timber processer with smarter products that increase profitability and promote sustainability. The first basic models have grown into highly engineered machines capable of cutting any wood on any continent.

Asia’s hard and softwoods and large logs sizes are no exception. Wood-Mizer’s professional orange line of sawmills and equipment provide a wide range of opportunities for small businesses and individuals.

For higher production and cutting the extreme hardwoods found in Asia, Wood-Mizer has added more industrial sawmilling equipment to their product range, and is now supplying carbide-tipped blades for cutting tough hardwoods.

The well-known orange sawmills are just the beginning, however. Industrial sawmills providing heavy-weight capacity to handle the logs found in Asia and Smart Log Processing lines are capable of commercial-level production with the advantages that thin-kerf blades give – lower operational costs and more sawn timber from every log.

Wide band sawmills built for dependable production even in remote regions are the latest development in Wood-Mizer’s line. Other diverse products include resaws, edgers, moulders, crosscuts, material handling equipment and more.

Unique among thin-kerf sawmills manufacturers, Wood-Mizer has a dedicated Asia HQ located in Taichung City, Taiwan, along with service technicians, distributors and regional managers to look after customer needs. With branch offices on five continents and more than 100 authorised distributors worldwide, Wood-Mizer is committed to customer success. Our international sales and service teams offer advice, experience, and local service worldwide, with experience in diverse markets for many years.

“We have distributors throughout the region to support our customers,” Robert Moxham, Wood-Mizer’s Regional Director for Asia shares. “We have our own country managers in India and Taiwan… And we have technicians in India to support that part of the world, and in Taiwan to support the rest of Asia. This is in addition to our distributors in most Asian countries, who provide local sales and service support.”

The benefits of Wood-Mizer sawmilling technology in Asia

 “We are using narrow-band saw thin kerf and when timber is becoming more expensive, increasing the yield becomes important,” Mr. Moxham shares. “In addition, due to their customers pressing for lower price for their products, most manufacturers are trying to find ways to increase the yield and streamline their processes to produce their product.”

As well, with labour costs rising, another thin-kerf benefit is that fewer labourers are required.

“In today’s market, labourers are becoming more and more expensive,” Robert says. “Therefore, manufacturers are looking for some form of modernization in their sawmills and to minimize labour requirements.”

The thin-kerf formula is catching on, Robert says, especially among manufacturers pressured to make changes to decrease their overhead, and younger sawmillers taking up the business operations from their fathers.

Why Wood-Mizer for Asia? Sawmillers share their experience

Upul Ekanayake is one of the directors of ElectroRef Engineers in Colombo, Sri Lanka. 10 years ago, his company bought a sawmill for their own timber production. “In Sri Lanka the price of electricity is very high. The Wood-Mizer is the best option to achieve low consumption of electricity. We have expensive hardwood materials, so if you gain another piece of sawn timber by using thin-kerf blades, the savings is great for everybody.”

Mr. Mahawatta from Aturugiriya, Sri Lanka shares, “You can get 85% yield from a good quality log if you use a thin-kerf sawmill. In the old days, we were only getting 50-60% yield from our logs. I spent five million Sri Lankan rupees for this [LT40] sawmill. In one and half years, I have earned my investment back three times.”

High on a Bhutanese mountain ridge, Mr. Karma Thinley is the Building Project Director for the Royal Academy in Bhutan, which will require 28,000 cubic metres of timber over the course of eight years to complete, all of which they are sawing on-site. In order to meet their objectives for timber production, they added a Wood-Mizer LT70 sawmill, after already having a swing-blade sawmill on site.

“In Bhutan, traditional design means lots of timber is going to be used.” Mr. Karma Thinley shared. “Prior to the Wood-Mizer we had a [different] portable sawmill. And when we did a calculation on the costs of the wastage of timber, we found that approximately one third of the total timber requirement for the project, just from the waste alone, we can recover the costs of by investing in the Wood-Mizer.”

D.P Singh, from Sylvan Plyboard in Kolkata, India manages a massive sawmilling and plyboard manufacturing company – employing upwards of 1,500 people and processing 700+ cubic metres of timber daily. He uses eight different thin-kerf sawmills ranging from small manual sawmills up to industrial sawmills and multi-head resaws, such as Wood-Mizer’s latest HR700 resaw.

“What we get from the machine is better, because the blade thickness is very good,” said Mr. Singh. “So we can recover the cost of the machine within one or two years.”

Thin-kerf looking forward

In regard to next additional steps for the future, Robert Moxham is certain that thin-kerf multihead resaws hold huge potential for India, and the rest of Asia, as well as the new LX sawmill series and Wide Band sawmills.

“As more countries are banning the export of logs, our Horizontal Resaws are becoming more important for the market,” Robert says. “There will also be demand for our Smart Log Processing Lines as plantation timber are becoming smaller around 30 cm and below.  Therefore using labour intensive traditional bandsaws will not be productive.”

Thin-kerf sawmilling benefits conservation objectives

Mr. Mahawatta from Sri Lanka advises, “My advice for the Sri Lankan sawmillers is that people should be educated on how to use Wood-Mizer sawmills to meet their sawmilling requirements. We have limited forests in Sri Lanka, so you need to save wood and not waste it unnecessarily.”

“We have a broader mission than just producing machinery and selling them,” Wood-Mizer President and CEO John Smith shares. “We have a commitment to both our customers and the environment. We have a dream to provide an alternative to the more traditional methods of sawing logs. And we also have an intention to enjoy doing it.”

We try to help you make the right choice to suit your own plans, however ambitious. When acquiring a Wood-Mizer sawmill, you buy more than the product – you become a part of the Wood-Mizer family.

Face the future of your company confidently with Wood-Mizer.