Calstrip to build
on Nucor campus
Calstrip Industries Inc. plans to build a $15 million processing facility on the campus of Nucor Steel Arkansas near Blytheville, the Los Angeles firm said Wednesday.
Construction is to begin before July. The first phase will be a 100,000-square-foot building with two planned additions that will expand the total facility to more than 300,000 square feet.
The $15 million initial phase will create 45 jobs.
The Calstrip investment comes after recent announcements by Nucor Corp. that it is building a $240 million galvanizing line and a $230 million specialty cold mill complex in Mississippi County.
With the opening of the $1.3 billion Big River Steel plant in 2016, the county is one of the largest steel producers in the United States.
-- David Smith
Canada's Conifex
buys Glenwood mill
A Glenwood sawmill that reopened a year ago, seven years after its closure, has been sold to a firm in Canada that already has other Arkansas ties.
Conifex Timber Inc., of Vancouver, British Columbia, announced Tuesday that it had purchased the Glenwood mill and another one in Florida from an affiliate of Blue Wolf Partners LLC for $250 million. Conifex said it will expand lumber production capacity by 50 percent, to about 1.1 billion board feet a year.
The Glenwood mill underwent a $14 million renovation and reopened May 15, 2017, producing its first lumber since 2010. Georgia Pacific Corp. opened the mill in 1974.
Conifex owns a former Georgia Pacific sawmill in El Dorado, which was restarted last year after Conifex invested about $80 million.
Ken Shields, president and chief executive officer of Conifex, called the purchase of the Arkansas and Florida sawmills "strategic and transformative" for the company.
-- Stephen Steed
State index jumps
3.79; 14 stocks gain
The Arkansas Index, a price-weighted index that tracks the largest public companies based in the state, gained 3.79 to 421.83 Wednesday.
Total volume for the index was 25 million shares, with 14 of 16 issues advancing.
Nationally, stocks recovered a portion of Tuesday's decline, with the Russell 2000 index setting a new high, said Leon Lants, managing director at Stephens Inc. in Little Rock. "The U.S. Treasury 10-year yield failed to dampen spirits although interest rate sensitive sectors including utilities and real estate underperformed," he said.
The index was developed by Bloomberg News and the Democrat-Gazette with a base value of 100 as of Dec. 30, 1997.
Business on 05/17/2018