Wooduk, Burnie has never been a viable option. It has never been...

Wooduk, Burnie has never been a viable option. It has never been "much better". Where did you get that idea from? TT?

Wood processing plants need to be built in places that primarily minimise the average cart distance for its feedstock. Then access to shipping, roads, power grid, etc. Bell Bay ticks many more boxes than Burnie (Hampshire).

Did TAP give you that silly 4 tonnes of pulp per hectare figure? After removing moisture and lignin, a quarter of a tree is fibre (pulp). Average Tasmanian green wood yields are around 220 tonnes per hectare. That's around 54 tonnes of pulp per hectare.

Woody, don't rely on Lawrence as a source of accurate information. Gunns manages much more than 100,000 ha of hardwood palntation in Tasmania. I leave you to find the true figure.

That's enuff for now.

Exit44 - I think you'll find that Gunns owns a fairly large proportion of the plantations under its management, though MIS would account for more. MIS investors paid land rent upfront (and hence indirectly) when they purchased their woodlots. They don't pay 'rent' beyond that.

Unfortunately for Gunns, they have regular lease payments to make on the land they leased to plant the woodlots on. The NPV of the ca. 10% that they will keep from eventual timber sale proceeds will not now cover the NPV of those lease payments plus other cost to the tune of the $200m MIS write-down.

The revaluation of plantations is based on the current export wood chip price. If there was a pulp mill the mill door price will be higher than the current wood chip price. Hence a cashed up buyer looking at the full works of timber, land and the pulp mill project would be looking at an opportunity to improve the metrics considerably.