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No study has been previously completed on the range of sites, potential yield, and financial characteristics of poplar short rotation coppice plantations (SRC) in Hungary. This paper conducts a literature survey to reveal the biomass production potential of such plantations and presents a model that is used to analyze their financial performance. The results indicate that the break-even-point of production is between 6 and 8 oven-dry tons per hectare per year once a minimum cost level and wood chip price within a 10% range of the 2020 value are considered. The higher the wood chip price, the lower the break-even-point. Since the model excluded the administrative costs that depend on the type and size of the management organization, the break-even-points can be significantly higher in reality, which suggests that short rotation energy plantations can be a financially reasonable land-use option in above average or even superior poplar-growing sites. The rotation period of industrial poplar plantations that produce high quality veneer logs ranges from 12 to 25 years. Though such sites can provide higher returns on investment, short rotation plantations have the advantage of providing a more evenly distributed cash flow. To facilitate the wider application of poplar SRC, the related policies need to apply specific subsidies and allow the rotation cycle to be extended up to 20–25 years, which is currently limited to 15 years.

The private forestry sector in Hungary was reintroduced in the early 1990s, as a part of the initial economic reform package aimed at transforming the economy from central planning to a market economy. The fundamental changes required a complete restructuring of the forestry sector, which is still going on, with sound information becoming ever more important. The Economic Monitoring Network for Private Forests in Hungary (EMN-PF) is supporting a price and cost reference database, financial analysis of forestry processes, forestry holding analysis and estimation of the economic output of the private forestry sector. Each output is based on data collecting methods that are balanced between accuracy and ease of data collection. EMN-PF applies surveys and uses open databases as data sources. Forest owners' and integrators' estimates are an easy way of collecting data, but the accuracy of data is difficult to control. The analysis of forest holdings can be based on the annual financial reports of forest enterprises with pure forest activity. These reports are already existing documents, which therefore are easy to collect in large numbers, but do not provide highly detailed data. Based on the National Forest Inventory and the results of the financial analysis, the economic output of the private forestry sector can be estimated.