SEARSMONT – Though China gets plenty of attention for its growing role in producing goods that are shipped worldwide, it is not just manufacturing jobs that are finding their way to the Asian economic powerhouse.

Last week, a local company made the trek to Shanghai, China, where its representatives attended a trade show to find out if it might find more buyers for one of its products.

Robbins Lumber participated in a trade mission led by Maine International Trade Center to an international forestry and woodworking machinery exhibition known as “Woodmac.”

John Benjamin, Robbins’ sales and operations manager for value-added products, said Wednesday the company’spurpose in attending the show was to explore ways of boosting sales of white pine lumber overseas.

“[It went] very well, I think,” he said. “We made a lot of contacts. There seems to be quite a bit of business in white pine.”

According to MITC, its Maine softwood booth offered Chinese-language marketing materials at the show, which ran from June 27-30.

Robbins Lumber employs 125 people and each year manufactures roughly 26 million feet of pine boards, according to Benjamin.

Benjamin said the comparative cost of transporting goods to China is low because so many container ships that come to the United States from Asia make the return trip relatively empty. But still there is fierce competition from other wood suppliers outside China to produce lumber as cheaply as possible, he said.

In 2005 the United States exported $472 million worth of forestry and wood products to China, which is now Maine’s fourth-largest export market behind Canada, Malaysia and Singapore, the trade organization said in a written statement. Maine’s total exports to China have grown more than 300 percent in the past five years.

“The Chinese market is too big to ignore,” Robbins Lumber President Jim Robbins said in the same statement. “[W]e are grateful that the Trade Center provided this opportunity for us to participate in a Maine booth, display products, and meet with buyers and market leaders.”

According to Benjamin, part of the mission included tours of Chinese manufacturing facilities. He said he and other Mainers who went on the mission visited factories where Chinese workers were making furniture, doors, windows and pressure-treated wood.

Besides Benjamin, MITC staff members Stephen Franck and Zeynep Turk, Scott Astle of the Farmington firm Timber Resource Group, and Jeff Porter of the U.S. Department of Commerce went on the trip.

“They’re not using cutting-edge technology over there,” he said. “They don’t have to because their labor is so much cheaper.”

He said the trip helped reinforce the popular prediction that America’s manufacturing future lies in specialty products.

“The more you can do to specialize, and the more you can have shorter lead times [in production], the better off you’ll be,” Benjamin said. “That’s the niche we need to pursue.”

Benjamin said he was surprised to find that some European companies had representatives at the event. He said it is a testament to China’s growing economic power that an American firm and a European firm could potentially strike a deal after having established contact with each other at a major trade show in the Asian country.

“There are a lot of leads to now follow up on,” Benjamin said. “It if keeps going the way it seems to be, then we’ll be back [at next year’s show].”