COLOMBIA – The Chilean board manufacturer Arauco stands out among its peers by recording the best performance figures in 2018 according to the Notifix® Index.

This index is the product of the evaluation of the seven leading international manufacturers of wood panels that publish comparable results: Arauco (Chile), Duratex (Brazil), Eucatex (Brazil), Masisa (Chile), Norbord (Canada), Pfleiderer (Germany) and Sonae Indústria (Portugal).

In the 2018 comparison, Arauco stood out in terms of EBITDA growth (+ 36.9%) and net income (+ 168.8%). In the EBITDA growth, Arauco was followed by Brazilian Duratex and the German / Polish Pfleiderer, with improvements of 11.6% and 11.5% respectively. In 2018, Chile’s Masisa recorded the smallest increase in EBITDA (2.2%), followed by Canada’s Norbord (7.7%).

Regarding profit growth, like Arauco, Duratex showed a positive performance (50.1%). This in a year where all the other companies evaluated showed negative profit growth.

In 2018 the best EBITDA margins were for Arauco and Norbord: 31.1% and 29.9% respectively. Followed by Eucatex (18.4%) and Duratex (18.2%), both from Brazil. In terms of sales, Duratex obtained the largest increase in 2018 (30.1%), followed by Norbord (11.3%) and Eucatex (8.0%). For its part, the Chilean Masisa experienced the largest drop in sales in 2018 (-42.1%).

A year ago, the result of the 2017 Notifix Index placed Canada’s Norbord in the leading position in terms of sales growth (+ 23.3%), EBITDA (+ 74.5%), as well as EBITDA margin improvement (+9.0 p.p.). For that year (2017) the second best performance in sales was for Masisa with an increase of 10.2%.