Davidson Industries, the leading supplier of eastern white pine (EWP) to the UK furniture market, was recently acquired by Tembec Industries. Tembec is a C$4bn integrated forest products company headquartered in Temiscamingue, Quebec, with global manufacturing and marketing operations.
Tembec’s goal is to provide a complete basket of goods able to meet demand for any wood product, grade, species, price, or quality. The acquisition of Davidson (to be renamed Tembec Europe Ltd this month) in late 2001 emphasised Tembec’s strategic commitment to promote value added timber products to supplement its commodity softwood lumber, pulp and panel businesses.
In 1997 Davidson Industries, which is one of the largest producers of EWP (also known as Quebec yellow pine) in North America, opened a branch office in the UK to service the European market directly. The company strategy was to provide more direct communication between manufacturer and market, encouraging broader usage of EWP through the development of brand name recognition. Concentrating on the three key elements of consistent supply, stable price, and predictable quality the company saw its market share rise rapidly.
Doubling engineered wood
As part of Tembec’s Forest Products Group, Davidson now has access to twice the volume of EWP from the parent company’s mills in Ontario and Quebec, as well as other products not previously manufactured by the company, such as hardwood flooring and softwood lumber. And Tembec has created a Specialty Wood Products division under which the manufacturing and marketing of all value-added, non-commodity products has been organised. In addition to doubling the volume of EWP available, the Davidson team now oversees three hardwood lumber mills manufacturing maple, birch, oak, and other northern species, two solid strip hardwood flooring operations manufacturing both unfinished and prefinished flooring under the Muskoka and Vintage brands, one sawmill in France processing Douglas fir and whitewood timber, and a sawmill and fingerjoint plant in Chile manufacturing radiata pine products.
Tembec Europe has its registered office in Dublin, Ireland where Peter Herbert handles hardwood flooring, while direct market support for EWP and CLS is handled by Chris Skelton in the Doncaster office in Yorkshire in the UK. The structure favoured by Tembec is to have a sales manager reside at the mill to provide market information and customer feedback as a counter balance to a purely production driven philosophy.
Tembec intends to invest heavily in the European business. Sales of softwood this year are anticipated to be 35,000m3 and sales of solid strip hardwood flooring should reach 150,000m2. Growth this year will come from adding new products from the range of Davidson white pine, Tembec CLS and Muskoka hardwood flooring.
