A Penticton. B.C. company billed as a mass timber manufacturing leader and is the major supplier to Adera, a Vancouver mass-timber residential developer, has filed for bankruptcy in the U.S. and is poised to be purchased by another B.C. firm.
Structurlam announced April 26 it had entered into a ‘stalking horse’ asset purchase agreement with Vancouver’s Mercer International, a global forest products company. A stalking horse is chosen by a bankrupt company to put in an initial bid on its assets. The bankruptcy court must approve the choice and the bid, and then other companies are allowed to pursue the purchase of Structurlam.
“I am delighted and grateful for Mercer’s vote of confidence in Structurlam and in its leadership in the mass timber industry,” Structurlam CEO Matthew Karmel said in a press release. “It is especially rewarding given the difficult period the company has had since suspending its operations in Arkansas mid-January, and it will help in normalizing the plant operations going forward.
Structurlam is also a cornerstone in a B.C. government decade-long initiative to support the mass-timber industry in the province. B.C. changed the provincial building code to allow to allow for construction of mass timber buildings reaching 12 storeys, up from six storeys. The province also required the use of engineered wood where possible in the construction of the new St. Paul’s Hospital and other provincial builds.
Among other structures, Structurlam supplied engineered wood for the 18-storey Brock Commons at the University of British Columbia, the tallest mass timber structure in the world when it completed in 2017.
Structurlam made headlines in 2019 when it was chosen to supply 1.7 million cubic feet of mass timber for Walmart’s international headquarters in Arkansas. It opened a plant in Conway, Arkansaw, to supply the project, but the contract was cancelled in January. That led to Structurlam suspending operations at the facility and laying off 144 employees.
"We had a commercial dispute,” Karmel told the Arkansas Democrat Gazette in January, “but we cannot discuss the specifics.”
Structurlam has agreed to sell its Arkansas plant and its Canadian assets, located in Penticton and Okanagan Falls, for $60 million.
Adera, which has used Structurlam engineered wood on a variety of residential projects from the North Shore to the Fraser Valley, some of which are under construction, did not return requests for comment.
- With file from Castanet.net
