Page 15 - Georgia Forestry - Fall 2017

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since 1974. You want the ugly of consol- idation? He can give you a buffet line of mergers and acquisitions that turned ugly, their bones buried in the Georgia forests belonging to bygone names: Union Camp. Hammermill. St. Regis. Mead, among others.
Izlar has to pause and take a breath reciting the names of paper companies gone kaput in mergers and acquisitions.
“The first thing I look at,” said Izlar, “is we don’t have any fewer mills than what we had before these changes took place.”
Naturally, Interfor faced questions of creating a monopoly when it first came into Georgia. Timber owners cast a wary eye on the Canadians and their ambi- tion. West Fraser, experts estimate, will control 10 percent of all softwood sawmill capacity in North America.
The timber families in Georgia appre- ciate the opportunity to do business with the Canadian giants and welcome the action. They have some business acumen, too, you know.
“If we don’t like the price we don’t have to sell it,” said one forest landowner. “There are hundreds of stories of fam- ilies like us that are very careful about their pricing strategy and holding on and replanting.”
Also consider that there are approxi- mately 100 mills in the state and not all of them are devoted to making 2X4s, which is the bread-and-butter of some major wood companies coming into the state. The Georgia landowner sees the medley of products as crucial to maintaining equilibrium between supply and demand.
“We have a thriving timber market in Georgia,” he said. “We have markets in pulp, chip and saw, and tall timber and sub-specialty markets, such as wood pellets and whole logs being exported.
“People can do different things down here. Whole logs are going to China.
Lee Rhodes stands in the family office for Rhodes Timber located in Siloam, GA.
in mergers and acquisitions is that nasty word “consolidation.” But what infra- structure did Interfor have to consolidate here in the U.S.? It had none.
“When you have a merger, what is the first word you hear? Synergy,” Izlar said. “We are going to gain so much synergy merging XYZ with QBR and this new company XQ. The least productive plant, ‘close it’ and, by the way, let’s reduce personnel by 10 percent.
“That hasn’t happened with any of these acquisitions. In our business when somebody buys somebody out, heads roll because there is a lot of redundancy. They didn’t have a personnel department over in Alabama running five saw mills. They had no personnel department here, no accounting department in place. They are using what’s here. It hard to paint a downside to this.”
Izlar has been around the industry
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