About Us

Ike Trading Co., Ltd. was incorporated in 1965 in New York, NY as a subsidiary of Ikeuchi Industry Co., Ltd. 

Ikeuchi Industry Co., Ltd. is a company in Hokkaido, Japan which was one of the leading hardwood plywood manufactures in Japan.
We started out as a sole sales office for the USA market for Ikeuchi Industry Co., Ltd.

 

Around 1983, Ikeuchi stopped producing and selling plywood to USA market due to many reasons and we shifted to trading wood products from outside of our group companies.
We went to Taiwan to have them produce plain slice fancy plywood for us. Later on, we moved to Indonesia to have them produce fancy plywood by supplying related raw materials such as American hardwood logs, birch veneer, and sen flitches from Japan.
We are always a pioneer to open up a new dimension to imported hardwood plywood business in USA with great success.

Actually we were the first USA importer who imported Chinese hardwood plywood from China. We are not the biggest, but we are always consistent and have a reputable presence in all overseas buying market and the US market.

 

Due to countervailing and antidumping duty affecting against Chinese made plywood in 2017 it became impossible to import plywood from China any longer. We decided to take advantages of this opportunity to move into plywood production in Vietnam. We had studied and tested Vietnamese indigenous plantation wood such as Acacia, Eucalyptus and mixed hardwood for core veneer production with great success. We built our own plywood manufacturing plant with 7,000 M3 of monthly plywood production capacity including UV line in Pho Tho, Vietnam where we can harvest vast amount such plantation wood. The production started in March 2019 with state of art machineries being set up in 15,000 m2 of modern brand-new warehouse in 27,159 m2 of land in Phu Ha Industrial Park. We also developed exclusive partnership with several white birch veneer peeling mills in Russia from whom we can import white birch veneer directly to our factory to secure face and back veneer of our plywood production.

At the same time we keep an eye on supply of Indonesian indigenous plantation wood such as Falcata and Jabon. We have developed exclusive partner mills in Indonesia who can produce meranti/MLH plywood with combi core or meranti core.

 

Being a fancy plywood manufacture in Japan, we also began sourcing American hardwood logs such as white oak, red oak, walnut, cherry, hard maple to the overseas market from around 1985.
Our fancy plywood suppliers also became our customers and we were able to establish much closer relationship with those manufactures than any other US importer.
Through the course of purchase and sales activities, there are a lot of interaction between plywood mills and their key vendor contacts where we are able to acquire more insight about their quality and cost of those mills than any other US importer.

 

In 1987, we started producing basswood, white oak, and hard maple veneer in Wisconsin.
This operation was unfortunately relocated to Northern China in 1997 due to cost challenge from the market.
However, the Wisconsin site reincarnated to become one of our major log procurement yard in the US.

In 2012, we established another log yard in Ohio where we procure key strategic items such as walnut and white oak.

We now have log yards in Wisconsin, Ohio, New York and Pennsylvania including our associated producers where we manage and procure American hardwood logs in proper manner to satisfy industry needs.
We also have developed log yards in Europe from around 1995 where we procure European hardwood logs such as European beech, European oak, European sycamore, European ash.

In this way we are able to supply full range of Northern hardwood and european hardwood species of logs to our customers in the world.

 

In 2002, Ike Trading Co., Ltd. was acquired by OG Corporation, a large chemical trading company in Osaka, Japan.
This move was beneficial to us as it allows us to utilize OG's huge financial strength through 3 Japanese mega banks and Wells Fargo.

 

Ike Trading Co., Ltd. is considered one of the leading companies in the wood industry sourcing wood products worldwide.

We are headquartered in Beaverton, OR USA with 20 offices around the globe.
We source plywood and panel products from China, Japan, Taiwan, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Russia, Europe and Latin America.
We sell logs to China, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Turkey, Egypt and Europe.