Lao Agar International Development

Lao Agar International Development signed a memorandum of understanding with the Government of Lao PDR in 1998 and brought its factory on Dongkhamxang Road in Vientiane into operation the following year, making it one of the country's earliest formal agarwood enterprises. It runs plantations of Aquilaria malaccensis — the species behind what Lao producers call mai ketsana — across Vientiane Capital and Xaysomboun Province, and works jointly with Laos's own Science and Technology Research Institute on plantation technique and processing methods. Resin formation is induced through fungal inoculation of standing trees, requiring roughly eight to twelve years of maturation before harvest, and oil is extracted by water or steam distillation, which the company states yields material that is 99 percent pure and free of added chemicals. Laos sits alongside Vietnam and Cambodia on the Indochinese agarwood belt, and mai ketsana has long moved through the same regional trade in aloeswood, oud, and incense that has carried Southeast Asian agarwood to Middle Eastern and East Asian markets for centuries. A government-linked operation running continuously since 1999 gives Lao Agar a rare, verifiable institutional history for a craft more often documented village by village.