The Timber Group Investment Strategies
TTG is a demand-focused organization. We develop investment strategies by first identifying current and future market demands, and building backwards to identify compelling investment opportunities to supply those demands. We typically pursue investments on a programmatic basis, often aggregating properties within particular markets and geographies, in order to realize efficiencies of scale over time.
We see sustained, macro-level trends of shrinking supply and growing demand across a broad range of forest products, and particularly within Latin America’s emerging economies.
Increased demand is driven by a variety of factors, including:
- Rapidly growing per-capita demand, particularly in emerging markets
- Population growth, which compounds the effect of increasing per-capita demand
- Increasing demand for forest products as high energy costs make timber once again price-competitive with steel and concrete, which require far greater energy inputs to produce
- Expanding demand for forest products in new bio-fuels markets. Trees are a non-controversial source of biofuel, as forest plantations rarely compete directly with food production
- Increasing demand for ecosystem services, such as carbon, for which forests are a low-cost source of supply
Supply restrictions are growing, due in large part to:
- A declining land base of productive forests, as natural forests are cleared for agriculture or other land uses, and as remaining forests are increasingly protected
- Growing domestic demand for many forest products reduces export potential
- Increasing competition for land, particularly with the recent worldwide expansion in land area devoted to bio-fuels