Our Story

Australian Bluegum Plantations (ABP) holdings currently include over 85,000 productive hectares of plantations as well as world class port facilities located in the Albany region of Western Australia and the Green Triangle region of Victoria and South Australia. ABP employs over 300 permanent and contract staff

Our corporate values centre on prioritising safety, pursuing and rewarding innovation, delivering value to our customers and promoting a culture dedicated to continuous improvement in economic, social and environmental returns. These priorities are reflected in our core areas of activity: Marketing, Finance, Resource Management and Operations. ABP is distinguished from most other forestry companies by our strategy of managing the entire supply chain. This provides the opportunity to directly control costs and mitigate risk, giving us a competitive advantage in building the value of the company. 

Our plantations are established on high quality land that meets strict criteria for environmental considerations and location. Plantations are grown on short rotation cycles (usually 10-15 years) to produce premium woodchips. These are exported from ABP port facilities to customers in China and Japan for the manufacture of high-grade paper products and rayon. Our customers can be assured ABP estate management practices meet stringent standards against a number of criteria. ABP management systems are inspected and certified to internationally-recognised Forest Stewardship Council® (FSC-C019740) benchmarks for forest management and chain of custody.

History

ABP’s plantation forestry enterprise was created in 2009 by Global Forest Partners (GFP) to acquire, manage and harvest Eucalyptus globulus (Tasmanian blue gum) plantations, in order to produce and market premium woodchips to meet the growing demand from pulp and paper customers in China and Japan. 

ABP initially comprised the Timbercorp plantation estate located in the Albany and Green Triangle regions, together with many of the people involved in creating and managing the original Timbercorp estate.  In 2012 the investment grew with the acquisition of part of the Elders Forestry plantation estate in the same regions, including their seed orchard and chip handling facility at Albany and the employment of a number of Elders’ staff.  In the same year ABP purchased Gunns’ state-of-the-art chip handling facility at Portland, Victoria.  Together, these 2012 acquisitions meant ABP now controlled a substantial plantation base and its own supply chain from seed production right through to ship loading in both regions, representing a tremendous foundation on which to build a successful forestry enterprise. At the time approximately two-thirds of the plantation estate was located on leased land and one third on freehold land.

Since inception ABP has built a reputation in the Asian chip market as a highly reliable supplier of premium quality E. globulus chips.  As the mature tree crop has been harvested some of the leasehold land has been handed back to the underlying landowners and ABP has implemented an active land acquisition program.  Today, approximately 60% of the ABP estate is freehold with the balance being leasehold, providing a greater degree of land tenure certainty to ABP and its customers.

Overview

  • ABP employs over 300 permanent and contract staff, including those based at our world-class port facilities in Albany and Portland.
  • In total ABP exports up to 3.3 million Green Metric Tonnes (GMT) annually to China and Japan – 1 million GMT from ACT; 2 million GMT from PCT and 300,000 GMT of softwood.

Green Triangle region

  • The ABP estate in the Green Triangle is over 50,000ha of blue gum plantations, with approximately 10,000ha in South Australia and 44,000ha in Victoria.
  • ABP recently invested $22m in improvements to the Portland Chip Terminal (PCT) facilities.
  • The capacity of the hardwood stockpile at PCT is 160,000 GMT (GMT), with the capacity of the softwood stockpile being 85,000 GMT.
  • Three unloaders at PCT receive on average 650 GMT of hardwood chips per hour, delivered around the clock by our contractors, with two softwood chip unloaders receiving around 250 GMT per hour.

Albany region

  • The ABP estate in the Albany region is over 31,000ha of blue gum plantations.
  • The stockpile capacity of Albany Chip Terminal (ACT) is 120,000 hardwood GMT.
  • Two unloaders at ACT receive wood chip deliveries. Recent improvements have increased ACT chip throughput to over 400 tonnes p/h.
  • The Conor Boyd Seed Orchard covers 5.7ha with 1346 trees planted.