My Wood, My Sawmill" business meetings
The "Mon Bois, Ma Scierie" business meetings took place on Friday 24 March at the Bois & Habitat trade fair. Aimed at forest owners, sawyers and secondary wood processing companies, this event is an opportunity to develop new partnerships and exploit the advantages offered by a local business relationship.
For this second edition of the Business Meetings, the organisers decided to bring together sawyers and secondary wood processing companies, but also to invite forest owners to take advantage of the initiative. That's why the Cellule d'Appui à la Petite Forêt Privée (CAPFP) and the Société Royale Forestière de Belgique (SRFB) have joined forces to organise the event, alongside Ressources Naturelles Développement , Embuild Menuisiers Wallons and the "Bois local - Notre savoir-faire" brand, which were already present last year.
"We can say that opening the event up to forest owners and forestry groups was a success, as they accounted for half of the participants in the 'Mon Bois Ma Scierie' 2023 business meetings," says Diego Bertrand, construction manager at Filière Bois Wallonie. "In addition to the expected target audience, a group of young people in training at IFPAME in Dinant also took part in the event. This enabled them to make some useful contacts before joining the wood industry as professionals at the end of their training, which finishes in June.
Positive feedback
Although the content of the discussions was left to the discretion of the participants, their reactions at the end of the event were positive. Here are a few selected extracts:
My aim was to be able to meet local sawyers so that I could sell wood in Wallonia rather than exporting it.
Alain Monseur, forest owner
We'll be back next year
Nicolas Spineux, "les copains des bois" sawmill
We'll be taking part in this event again to get to know other people or to meet up again with people we already know. This year we came as tourists, but next time we'll bring a computer, a folder of photos to show what we do and a price list.
Jeoffrey De Leener, La Source micro-scierie
I have noble species such as maple, wild cherry and black alder, which are more difficult to exploit than oak and beech, or even impossible to exploit at all if they are part of a large export cut. By taking part in these meetings, I wanted to know if there were any sawyers interested in these species, even for relatively modest quantities.
Alain Monseur, forest owner
More info
The aim of these meetings is to bring producers and processors closer together. Find out more about the event and what participants had to say in the full article available here. here.
These positive opinions are also confirmed by the feedback from the evaluation sent to participants. The vast majority of respondents said they would be interested in attending other business meetings. They also praised the quality of the welcome and the space provided by the Bois & Habitat show. The only point for improvement raised by the participants was that they would like even more meetings!
Mark your calendars for the 2024 edition of the Bois & Habitat trade show, and we look forward to seeing many of you there to make these meetings even richer.
