El Dorado sawmill closure announced
Conifex Timber facility will close two years after $80M renovation
Canada-based Conifex Timber announced earlier this week that it intends to shut down its El Dorado sawmill indefinitely on the heels of a report that revealed a 31% earnings decline from the same quarter in 2018.
The closure, which will take place over the next six months, will reduce Conifex's U.S. south lumber production by 21 million board feet by the end of the year. Ninety-two people will lose their jobs.
“We regret this difficult decision, however lumber prices are simply too modest to justify continued operations at a site that requires further capital expenditures to realize its potential as an
as an efficient, modern mill,” Conifex chair and CEO Ken Shields said in a statement. “While our wish is to restart the mill as soon we can, our immediate priorities are to identity the scope of a Phase 2 capital investment to help better inform a restart date.”
Conifex purchased the sawmill, a former Georgia Pacific facility that had been shuttered for almost a decade, in 2015 for $21 million. The company put in $80 million worth of improvements and reopened it in 2017.
Sandy Ferguson, a Conifex spokesperson at its headquarters in Vancouver, said the company's modernization plan was always intended to occur in two-phases.
"Rather than demolishing the mill to the ground, we tried to repurpose the mill into the equivalent of a modern mill," she said. "We'd hoped to complete the second phase later this year, but lower market prices made that impossible."
When the plant reopened in 2017, Gov. Asa Hutchinson called the event an important one, not just for South Arkansas, but for the entire state.