Aquilaria crassna, a tree species on CITES Appendix II and categorized as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List, is the main source of the highly valuable, fragrant and resinous agarwood that is extracted in forests in South-east Asia, exported to East Asian and Arab countries, and used for a range of medicinal, aromatic and religious products. Based on interviews with local, non-local and foreign harvesters in Laos we examined the relationships between harvesters' daily net revenue from agarwood extraction, their degree of commercialization (i.e. their differential access to markets) and their ability to target harvesting towards the small fraction of trees that do contain commercial qualities and quantities of agarwood. For comparison we included data on number of trees felled during the most recent harvesting trip. The analysis showed that poor targeting ability and low degree of commercialization were associated with low daily net revenues, whereas good targeting ability and high degree of commercialization were associated with high daily net revenues. In the case of A. crassna in Laos it therefore appears that the activities of highly commercialized harvesters are less harmful to A. crassna populations than those of less specialized, local harvesters.