Incoterms and Container Loading for Vietnam Plywood

For most plywood orders leaving Vietnam, the choice comes down to how much of the shipping chain you want the mill to handle. FOB Hai Phong or FOB Ho Chi Minh City is the common default: the mill delivers the loaded container onto the vessel and clears export, and you own the ocean freight and everything past the Vietnamese port. The rest of this page walks through when a different Incoterm makes sense, and how to read container yield so a quote in cubic metres turns into a real number of panels per box.

Which Incoterm should you use when buying plywood from Vietnam?

Incoterms 2020, published by the International Chamber of Commerce, are the rulebook that says where the seller's job ends and yours begins. Five come up again and again on Vietnamese plywood contracts. FOB, CFR and CIF are sea-freight rules written for containerised cargo out of Hai Phong and the Ho Chi Minh City terminals. EXW and DAP sit at the two extremes, one leaving almost everything to you, the other leaving almost nothing.

Read the risk column carefully. Under CFR and CIF the mill pays the freight, but risk still passes to you the moment the panels are on board in Vietnam. If a box goes over the side mid-ocean on a CIF contract, you are claiming against the insurance, not the mill.

What each rule changes for a plywood buyer

EXW puts the container collection, Vietnamese export paperwork and port haulage on you or your forwarder. It reads cheap on the invoice because none of that is priced in. Unless you have a strong agent on the ground in Vietnam, it usually costs more than it looks.

FOB is the workhorse. The mill loads and clears; you book the ocean leg with a carrier or forwarder you trust and control the freight rate yourself. That last part matters when ocean rates swing, which they do. Most buyers who ship more than a few containers a year settle here.

CFR and CIF hand the freight booking back to the mill. Handy for a first order or a buyer without a freight desk. The trade-off is that you lose visibility on the rate and the routing, and on CIF the seller only has to buy minimum cover, which is thin for a full container of panels. Many importers upgrade the policy on their own account.

DAP is the far end: the mill arranges everything to your yard or warehouse and you handle only import customs and duty at your side. Simple to receive, but you are trusting the seller's forwarder for the whole chain, and the price folds in margins you cannot see. It suits smaller or one-off buyers more than regular importers.

Does plywood cube out or weight out in a container?

This is the yield question that trips up first-time buyers, and the answer is different for a 20ft and a 40ft. Plywood is dense. Vietnamese plantation species run roughly 580 kg/m³ for acacia, 650 for eucalyptus, 700 for rubberwood (hevea) and about 500 for styrax. Treat those as planning values and confirm the real figure on the mill certificate, since core mix and glue line change the number. A single 18 mm sheet at 1220 × 2440 mm (4 × 8 ft) lands near 30 to 34 kg.

Now put that against the box. A 40ft or 40HC caps out around 26.5 tonnes of payload. Fill either one solid with plywood and the wood would weigh far more than that long before you run out of space, so a 40-footer weights out: you hit the tonnage limit with the container maybe two-thirds full. A 20ft is the opposite. It carries a similar payload ceiling but holds only about 33 CBM, so you run out of room before you run out of weight. A 20ft cubes out.

The practical upshot: for panels, the extra head height of a 40HC over a plain 40ft buys you almost nothing, because you were never going to fill that space anyway. You reach the weight ceiling first. Order thinner stock and the load gets lighter per cubic metre, so a thin-panel order can start to cube out even on a 40ft. Confirm every load against tonnage, not just volume.

How many panels fit in a container?

Because plywood weights out, the panel count on a 40ft is set by tonnage divided by sheet weight, not by how many sheets geometrically fit. Take 18 mm sheets near 32 kg each against roughly 26.5 tonnes of payload and you are in the region of 800 to 830 panels before you hit the limit. Thicker stock means fewer, heavier sheets; thinner stock means more, lighter ones, up to the point where the box cubes out instead. Species matters too, since a rubberwood-core panel weighs more than the same sheet in styrax.

These are planning figures for a rough count and a first sanity check on a quote, not a loading plan. Run your own thickness, panel size and species through the CBM and container-loading calculators on vinawoodltd.com/tools to get the yield for your exact order, rather than working it by hand here. The mill's packing list is the number that binds.

Does it matter whether you load in Hai Phong or Ho Chi Minh City?

Where your order loads follows where it is made. Northern mills in the Hai Duong, Bac Ninh and Bac Giang belt feed Hai Phong, Vietnam's main northern gateway. Southern and central production moves through the Ho Chi Minh City terminals, mainly Cat Lai. On an FOB contract that load port is part of the term itself, written as FOB Hai Phong or FOB Ho Chi Minh City, and it sets which inland trucking and terminal charges sit inside the mill's price.

For you as the buyer the port mostly changes sailing schedules, transit time and the carriers that call there, so it is worth confirming which port a mill ships from before you compare two FOB quotes as if they were identical. The panels themselves do not change. For where these mills sit and what each region tends to make, see the manufacturing-regions guide below.

Related guides

• Importing plywood from Vietnam
• Vietnam plywood HS codes: the HS 4412 breakdown
• Vietnam's plywood manufacturing regions
• Where Vietnam's plywood ships: export markets