Conifex successfully bid on Pope & Talbot’s Fort St. James sawmill. Conifex, an alliance of former industry players…
Conifex successfully bid on Pope & Talbot’s Fort St. James sawmill. Conifex, an alliance of former industry players with access to capital pools, overtook Asia Pulp & Paper’s bid on the bankrupt facility.
According to a report by the Vancouver Sun, Conifex paid $12.8 million for the mill, one of three facilities being sold via a BC Supreme Court receivership. The two remaining facilities, the Harmac and Mackenzie pulp mills, have not been sold. The Sun further reported that Conifex CEO Ken Shields said his company is interested in the possibility of gobbling up more mills.
“We see ourselves getting quite a bit larger,” the Sun reported him as saying. “Our objective would be to have a billion board feet of capacity down the road.” Shields said he feels the industry’s downturn has reached a point where the time is ripe for new “well-financed” players with fresh ideas to emerge.
“It’s an intelligent time to enter this sector, sweat it out for a couple of years and hopefully, times should be better for us,” the Sun reported Shields as saying.
Pope & Talbot purchased the mill from Canfor for $39 million in 2004.
In January 2007, a $285 million deal that would have seen Conifex purchase Domtar’s forest products business fell through.
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