Although a new record amount of wood was removed from German forests, forestry operations suffered a massive slump in profits in 2019.
They produced goods and services worth 6.9 billion euros, as the Federal Statistical Office reported on Monday in the forest accounts.
In the previous year it was 8.8 billion euros.
The net corporate profits even fell by 61 percent to 629 million euros.
Drought, storm and pests such as the bark beetle had increased the amount of so-called damaged wood, which could only be marketed at very low prices.
The high supply led to falling prices: In 2018, the price of raw wood slid by 12 percent, and then by another 36 percent in 2019, according to the statisticians.
In 2019, a total of 93 million cubic meters of wood were removed from the forests in Germany, a new high after the previous record of 90 million cubic meters from 2018. In the years 2014 to 2017, the average was 81 million cubic meters per year.
The lower price also meant that the so-called standing wood stocks fell sharply in value: According to statistics, it was 44 percent from the end of 2017 to the end of 2019.
According to the federal government, Germany is one of the most densely forested countries in Europe with a forest area of around 32 percent.
48 percent of this is private forest, 19 percent of the area is owned by municipalities.
Conifers grow on more than half of the forest area.
The government presented the current forest report in mid-July, which covers the period from October 2017 to May 2021. At the end of 2020, the damaged forest area in Germany was a total of 277,000 hectares - that's slightly more than the area of the Saarland.