Cambium Build will start installing Slovenian machinery at Argentina’s first cross-laminated timber plant next month, with the final container for the production line now en route to the Port of Buenos Aires. That is according to Ledinek Engineering, which has shipped the last of the equipment to Gobernador Virasoro in Corrientes and expects on-site work to begin in September.
Pablo Baldomá presented the plant at the seminar the Asociación Forestal Argentina held at Posadas on Friday, alongside the chief executives of ArPulp, Acon Timber, and Central Puerto. Manuel Chiappe counted the four Corrientes projects as exceeding US$2.5 billion, and the national undersecretary for agricultural and forestry production told the room that Argentina had not seen private capital move on such a scale in many years.
Corrientes Governor Juan Pablo Valdés launched the investment at Casa de Gobierno on 1 June, with Cambium Build spending more than $20 million on a building of 4,800 square metres raised on the site of the former Pomera Maderas sawmill. Sixty people are at work on the works, which Baldomá expects to finish between December and January, and the province will create 300 direct and indirect jobs once the line runs.
“We fell in love with Corrientes,” Manuel Sobrado said at the launch, with the Insud executive director adding that investments stay and grow wherever a businessman finds a favourable climate. His group has held ground in the province for twenty years across tourism, livestock, and energy.
No Argentine plant presses cross-laminated timber or glulam to international certification, although Forestal Las Marías and technified sawmills across Misiones and Corrientes already turn out components to order for individual projects. Virasoro will be the first to offer complete high-precision processing, and the line starts at 15,000 cubic metres per year.
“Our idea is to advance the first structural grading line in Argentina,” Pablo Baldomá said, with the Cambium Build founder sending elliottii pine from Corrientes and Misiones to Europe for certification because the country still grades its timber by eye. Finger jointing, planing, structural grading, and panel pressing all go into Virasoro.
“Fear and prejudice about the quality and safety of the material, a lack of industrialisation, and ignorance,” Ambrož Ahec said of what has kept mass timber from advancing across South America, with the Ledinek sales engineer counting more than 400 staff across 56 countries behind the firm. Ahec names Arboreal’s Uruguayan line and developments in Chile and Brazil among the plants Ledinek either helped assemble or supplied.
Arboreal has been pressing panels at Tacuarembó in northern Uruguay since 2022, on what the company credits as South America’s largest cross-laminated timber and glulam line, an operation producing 50,000 cubic metres of product shipped to markets from Brazil to the Dominican Republic. The World Bank’s IFC and the ILX Fund committed $40 million to the site in May, backing thermally modified wood and a 15 per cent increase in direct employment.
“Each piece is designed, machined, and adapted to the project before it reaches site,” Carlos Mazzey said, with the manager of Arboreal’s mass timber technical office counting a house of 80 square metres assembled in a week by three people. Cuts and drillings are finished before the timber leaves Tacuarembó, and a technical office in Montevideo works with architects and engineers from structural design through to production.
The six-storey Torre Experimental Peñuelas opened at the Lago Peñuelas reserve in November 2018, built by Chile’s housing ministry and the Universidad Católica’s timber innovation centre, which billed it then as Latin America’s tallest timber building. Researchers at the Universidad de Santiago de Chile have since subjected radiata pine panels to multiscale modelling and shake-table testing for high-rise use in one of the world’s most seismically active countries.
Urbem supplied nearly 700 cubic metres of cross-laminated timber and more than 600 of glulam for Latin America’s largest mass timber structure, and the shopping mall at Atibaia went up in seven months without a structural concrete pour. Builders across four Brazilian states now assemble timber houses in under 10 days, in a market that analysts count as filling a housing gap of 5 million homes.
It comes as Argentine mills take the worst of a squeezed market, with wood product prices running 20.7 per cent higher over the year to July compared with a wholesale index up 31.1 per cent. Cambium Build is finishing its shed in the middle of it.
“With a robust forest industry, adequate regulation, and financing, wood can help resolve the housing deficit and boost regional economies,” Daniel Vier said, with the CADAMDA president naming three conditions Argentina has yet to line up. CADAMDA counts 4 kilograms of carbon dioxide and 22 kilowatt hours in a square metre of timber structure, compared with 40 kilograms and 143 kilowatt hours in steel.
Regional delegates gave a more pessimistic picture of the seminar, reporting 500,000 hectares of plantations in Corrientes with no growth in the estate, and harvested ground simply replanted. Misiones has not beaten 12,000 hectares of new planting a year for a decade, and Entre Ríos has fallen to 100,000 hectares.
“In a short time we will talk about taking CLT containers anywhere in the world,” Valdés said of the plant at its launch, with the governor counting on export markets for panels his province cannot yet press. The containers moving now are going the other way, carrying Slovenian machinery into the Port of Buenos Aires.
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