Price systems for industrial roundwood vary considerably between countries depending on the number and size of the sellers and buyers and government interactions. Roundwood is a heterogeneous raw material meaning that different species, qualities and dimensions have different value potential for different end-uses. In the long term, price levels and price systems offer signals for roundwood production to forest owners who are capable of considering the economic feasibility of different actions required to grow appreciated raw material. In the study, five different price systems, pricing by roundwood assortments (PbA), pricing by total volume (PbV), pricing by stem size fractions (PbSF), pricing by assortment fractions (PbAF) and pricing by log dimensions (PbD), were compared by using bucking simulations. Price systems were analysed by the relationship between sale value and wood paying capability (WPC) which is a residual value of a raw material to the wood buyer, after deducting all the reasonable costs of manufacturing, distribution, marketing and otherwise conducting a business. The analysis included performance of the price systems in different stand types and elasticity of the price systems against changed log-length demand. The PbV and the PbSF tend to produce excessive sale values for the stands where WPC was low, and exceedingly low sale values for the stands where the WPC was high. The sale values were divided more by the WPC of the stand in the cases of the PbA, PbAF and PbD.

Key words: bucking; price systems; roundwood markets; roundwood price; price-quality relationship