Albania spent €349.3 million importing wood and wood products last year, €44.6 million more than the year before. Slovenia has roughly 2.2 million cubic metres of timber a year that its own forest management plans have already approved for felling and that nobody is cutting. Slovenia supplies €884,000 of that.
Those two positions met on the afternoon of 17 September at a business forum at the MOS fair in Celje, co-organised by the Institute for Strategic Solutions (ISR), the public agency SPIRIT Slovenia, the Albanian Investment Development Agency (AIDA) and Celje Fair, with the support of NLB. Albania was the MOS partner country. Of all the sectors raised across the afternoon, wood processing was the one both delegations kept returning to.
Albania has around 1,000 wood-processing companies employing some 7,500 people, on AIDA's figures, and an industrial zone at Elbasan built for the sector. What it does not have is enough wood. Its forests support an estimated sustainable yield of about one million cubic metres a year, and everything above that is imported. Julinda Kllapi, who heads Albania's wood cluster, traced most of the demand to construction and tourism. "All these new buildings, hotels and tourist facilities will need furniture," she said.
Headroom the state has already approved
Slovenia's forest management plans allowed a cut of 7,210,838 cubic metres in 2025, on figures from the Slovenia Forest Service (ZGS), which writes them. An estimated five million cubic metres came out, or 70 per cent of what was permitted. The year before, the allowance was 7,153,881 cubic metres and about 5.7 million were taken.
Nobody disputes that gap, which is what makes it useful. The 2.2 million cubic metres left standing in 2025 are not a conservationist's estimate of what the forest could bear, nor an industry estimate of what it would like. They are volumes the state forestry service wrote into a plan and cleared for removal. Any supply built on them is inside Slovenia's sustainable yield by definition, and the volume is more than twice Albania's entire national harvest.
Slovenian growing stock still reached a record 358.6 million cubic metres last year.
What Slovenia is allowed to cut, and what it cuts
Annual allowable cut against realised felling, million cubic metres
Source: Zavod za gozdove Slovenije, Poročilo o gozdovih 2023–25
The missing piece is aggregation
Nothing physical stands in the way. A sector that felled 5.7 million cubic metres in 2024 can fell more, and the state has already authorised it. The obstacle is commercial.
Some 77 per cent of Slovenian forest is privately held, 906,656 of 1,177,395 hectares, and private owners supplied about 70 per cent of last year's cut. For most of them forestry is not a meaningful source of income, Gal Kušar of the Slovenian Forestry Institute told a roundtable on the industry. Younger inheritors frequently do not know where their forests are. Some owners believe the best way to protect a forest is to leave it alone. Slovenia's long tradition of sustainable management, Kušar said, was precisely why it should "mobilise this untapped potential".
"All these new buildings, hotels and tourist facilities will need furniture."
Julinda Kllapi, Head of Albania's Wood Cluster
The felling figures say otherwise. Of the wood taken out in 2024, 2.09 million cubic metres — 45 per cent of the cut — was sanitation felling: trees removed because they were already dead, diseased or storm-damaged, not because anyone chose to harvest them. Bark beetles caused 44 per cent of the sanitation cut in 2025 and wind another 23 per cent. Private forests carried 70 per cent of it. An unmanaged stand does not keep its timber. It loses it on the beetle's schedule rather than the owner's.
Assemble Slovenian smallholder supply into volumes an export buyer can contract for, and the prize is the distance between a €884,000 trade and a market growing by €44.6 million a year.
A small baseline
Slovenia exported €883,656 of wood and articles of wood to Albania in 2025, some 739 tonnes, and imported €105,780 back, on figures from the Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia (SURS). AIDA put bilateral trade in wood at €1.1 million in its own presentation, drawing on Albanian statistics. The Slovenian mirror figure is €989,436. Both sides are counting the same trade.
The institutional groundwork is largely done. SPIRIT Slovenia and AIDA signed a memorandum of understanding in Tirana in February. Slovenian investment in Albania stood at €56 million in the first quarter of 2026, up 81 per cent since 2021, and NLB is preparing a representative office in the capital. What has not followed is the commercial layer.
Bernard Likar, who directs the Slovenian Wood Cluster, told the roundtable that good business starts with finding the right partners, and that Albania was no different from any other market. Laura Saro, AIDA's executive director, said she hoped to see Slovenia among Albania's top five trading partners as early as next year. The wood to build that on is already standing, and already approved.