MARKHAM, ON - Flakeboard America Ltd. announced it will buy the western U.S. panel assets of SierraPine, a California limited partnership. The purchase, announced January 14 and projected to close the first quarter of 2014, consists of the Ampine and Springfield particleboard plants located in California and Oregon, and the Medite MDF plant in Oregon.

Flakeboard is a subsidiary of Arauco. Upon completion of the acquisition, the company said the Arauco plants in North America will have an installed panel capacity of 2 billion feet square feet (3/4-inch basis) or 3.5 million cubic meters, adding to the capacity of the composite panel plants that Arauco holds in Brazil, Argentina and Chile. 

Flakeboard President Kelly Shotbolt said,"We are extremely excited about our proposed purchase of SierraPine and specifically the benefits that additional western facilities add in terms of product offering, manufacturing locations, and employee experience. Combined with existing Flakeboard mills, the transaction will bring new opportunities for our customers, our combined employees, and the communities in which we operate."

“SierraPine will work closely with Flakeboard to ensure a smooth transition of these facilities to the new ownership group. In the meantime we will continue to conduct business in the same manner as our customers have come to expect,” Jeff Johnson, president of SierraPine said in a statement.

SierraPine will permanently close its particleboard facility in Adel, GA. "This particleboard mill and its team members have served its customers well since it was built in 1965," Johnson said. "Since the economic downturn of 2008, the economics of operating this mill have changed dramatically and we don’t see that changing in the foreseeable future,” he added.

Based in Roseville, CA, SierraPine has been producing composite panels since the 1980s. SierraPine's mills are the latest acquisition by Arauco, which made its mark in the North American composite panel industry following the acquisition of Flakeboard's seven composite panel mills and Uniboard's North Carolina particleboard/MDF/TFM complex in 2012. The North American mills operate under the Flakeboard name.

Headquartered  in Santiago, Chile, Arauco also made news recently when it resumed plywood operations at its Nueva Aldea Industrial Forestry Complex plant, approximately two years after the facility was destroyed by fire.