Mr. Bill Stanley:

Coillte's facilities are customers for between 10% and 15% of the value generated from forests, with the balance sold to independent sawmills that buy the material at market rates. Even the material purchased by Coillte's own mill is bought at the same price as Coillte's own material and is a small fraction of the driver of the value. Every single piece of timber harvested by a partnership, whether through thinning or clearfell, the latter of which has not yet happened, follows a fully auditable trail showing every element harvested, transported, delivered over the weigh-bridge and invoiced by our customers. No other forestry company can demonstrate that level of transparency and the new commercial statement gives our partners access to that transparency. We will show them the payments they have received and how they have been calculated, as well as the payments which are forecast to be received and how they are calculated. The case studies included in our opening statement demonstrate that there is no question of Coillte taking a huge chunk of value at a cost to the partnership. In the vast majority of partnerships the partner or the landowner receives the majority of the value and Coillte's split is, on average, about 40%. In addition to this, we contend that we are adding to the overall value by a number of means.

For example, we are providing forestry management expertise, access to established market channels to maximise prices, economies of scale and, critically, a form of certification that is almost impossible for individual private forest owners to achieve on their own, given the overheads and level of administration involved but for which we have the necessary scale, and adds a premium to the end product's price.