Firstly, This is not an easy topic. Let’s focus on the situation of year 2015. We will write articles for the same topic every year since the changing situations.

Secondly, this is an article for those new players who’d like to begin business of importing flooring from China. It’s transparent to tell you all the truth.

There are several important aspect influence the flooring cost, e.g: type of floor, size of floor, shipping cost even currency rate.

Let’s firstly talk about the different sort of flooring you can order from China.

1. Solid Hardwood Flooring 

Solid hardwood flooring is still very popular and well sell all over the world even nowadays a lot of Eco-friendly shouts are out there. As people consider the hardwood flooring is noble, and because of the reducement of natural wood forrest all around the world, The cost of hardwood flooring become more expensive every year.

There are several aspects influence the solid wood flooring cost:

a). Wood Species

The cost of solid hardwood flooring are more concerns on the wood species. More durable/hard species are normally more suitable for being as hardwood flooring. And those kind of hardwood are usually comes from some endangered rain forest or Northern forest. Some of them needs more than 100 years to grow. So the cost of the timber become very expensive.

To make a rough comparison, I listed the export price (container based) for most of the common popular wood species:

All prices are for per square meter. (m2)

You can easily find out, for each single wood species, the cost is a range. That is mainly because of another important attributes: The size.

Wood is natural material, which means it will grow up over years. This characteristic makes the wood: “The bigger, more expensive.”

Length: Normally we sell wood flooring in Random length or fixed length.

Random Length stands for different length mixed in each packs. e.g: 300mm(1′), 600mm(2′), 900mm(3′), up to 1200mm (4′).

Fixed length stands for a fixed length in all packages. for example: 900mm fixed for all the flooring.

It is easy to understand that: the fixed length will be more expensive than random length floor. (because of more material wastage during production.)

And the longer the wood is, more expensive it will be.

Width: 

For solid hardwood, we have regular specifications of:  2.25″ (57mm) 3.5″ (90mm) and 5″ (125mm). The wider the flooring is, more expensive the price will be.

Thickness:

Most of the flooring is in 18mm (3/4″), But if you order sports floor with a size of 22mm (0.86″), The cost will be higher.

To get another comparison, we use Short-leaf Acacia, the most common sell wood species in U.S to give an impression on how the size influence the price:

All the size below is: Length x Width, R.L means Random Length from 300mm-900mm.

Thickness is 18mm (3/4″)

c. The grading of the wood

Again, because wood is Natural material, you can not avoid the Natural defects on it. Anyway, business people are alive,  the timber seller always sorting the wood material in different grade to get a different cost for different market requirements.

There will be different defects such as dead knots, live knots, sapwood, split, crack etc.. The flooring factory will repair those defects with epoxy resin or wood powder. But it’s just to make it smooth and flat, the dects still shows up on the timber.

With different grading of wood, you will also get the different prices:

For example:

For White Oak R.Lx90x18mm:

d. Treatment of wood

There are a lot of way to treat the wood, For example, Fume, Thermal-treatment,Handscraped, Antique style, Wire-brush etc.. It adds different costs to get a specified design.

2. Engineered wood Flooring 

Speaking of Engineered wood flooring, The situation is similar as solid wood. But there are some more aspects:

a. Structure

The engineered wood flooring is made by a Hardwood veneer+softwood base. The structure will make the flooring cost different.

For example:

Let’s speak of 1900 x 190 x 15/4mm Oak Wide Plank Flooring ABCD grade Unfinished (Well sanded without coating):

b. Veneer size

Same as solid wood, the wider, or longer, the higher cost.  But cost of Engineered wood flooring are more concern on the veneer size. Because the plywood or 3-ply base are being cut from a 4′ x 8′ big board. As long as the cut have no too much wastage, it will not influence the cost.

Another example:

Let’s check Multiply Engineered Oak Wide Plank Flooring ABCD with different veneer sizes:

c. Veneer cutting method

There are several ways to get wood veneers, sawn cut, slice cut and rotary cut. (click here to read more) Sawn cut veneer is much beautiful and looks natural but it’s definitely more expensive than sliced and rotary.

For example: For the same size flooring:  1200x120x12/2mm, 3 different cutting method have totally different cost:

d. The grading and treatment also influence the flooring cost a lot.

3. Bamboo Flooring

Bamboo is considered as “Grass”, not a wood species, The production way is different with wood. (click to check how do we sort bamboo flooring)

Normally Cost is like this:

Strand-woven Bamboo > Side Press > Plain Press

4. Laminated Flooring

Laminated Flooring are made up with a AL2O3 anti-scratch wear layer + deco paper + HDF + kraft paper.

It’s very obvious there are two main aspect that influence the laminated flooring price:

a. The wear layer thickness.

b. The HDF quality and density.

Laminated flooring price is usually from US$3.5/m2 to US$ 8.0/m2. Laminated flooring is not LORD PARQUET’s main products. so we do not judge it too much here.

Except from the products itself, There are other several important issues you need to consider:

1. Shipping Cost

Flooring shipment is heavy, normally All chinese factories offer FOB main port prices by sea shipment(Ship from Shanghai, Dalian, Shenzhen etc..). The sea freight is different depends on seasons and different shipping company. Normal situation is: If you choose a cheap ship, the delivery time will be little longer.

But If your destination is near to the port, Then congratulations, It’s cheaper for you to import from China.

Speaking of shipping cost, there is one important thing you have to consider: Container Loading capacity. All the flooring factory use 20ft container to load the flooring, because it’s very heavy. (if fullfill a 40ft container, it will be definitely too heavy and get fined by the shipping company.)

For easy transportation and unload, plywood pallets are always being used to reduce labor cost.

Below is the figure of how much sqm can be loaded in 1x20ft container with different thickness.

It is obvious that if you load more sqm, your unit shipping cost will be lower.

There is another theory: if the labor cost on your warehouse or destination is very low, we can also use below loading way, without any pallets, we can load more quantity in 1 container.

2. Currency Rate

Normally all Chinese factories offer USD price, which is much stable at the moment for them to avoid currency lose. That’s also a tradition because everybody doing export begin with USD.

So, the date I write this article (year 2015) is a very good lesson. For now, Many European customers giving up to order overseas, but seeking for manufactures locally, That’s mainly because of the Euro currency is very week at the moment. This gives them no profit to import from overseas.

Again, all the above price figures are just rough based on container based order FOB China main port. For any quotation please feel free to contact our sales team: info@lordparquet.com