William Bradley Southern - Louisiana-Pacific Corp.
Management
Thank you, Sallie, and good afternoon to all. As Sallie reported, we continue to drive strong SmartSide volume and revenue growth. Our capacity expansion strategy for SmartSide is to stay ahead of demand using a rigorous evaluation process. This process considers factors such as timing, scale, production cost, capital cost, staffing, construction risk and operating risk. Last quarter, we reported that we completed the mill swap in Québec with Norbord and acquired a manufacturing site in Cook, Minnesota that gives us additional flexibility to add capacity to support the growth in our SmartSide business. In addition, we have explored the option of converting other aspen wood-based OSB mills in our system or owned by others. Because of the growth we're seeing on the West Coast and our desire to lower the risk, our current plan is to convert our Dawson Creek, British Columbia OSB mill to a SmartSide plant. Key factors that differentiated this side are timing to first board, wood cost, cost of production, proximity to our West Coast customer base, and reduced operational risk due to the fact that Dawson Creek is currently staffed and producing OSB. We plan to request board approval for this conversion project in July once we have completed the detailed engineering and design. With that said, both Val-d'Or, Quebec and Cook, Minnesota sites are likely options for future Siding expansion. Given our strong SmartSide demand growth, we estimate that the Dawson Creek conversion will satisfy about two to three years of demand growth. Since Val-d'Or is not currently operating and the Cook, Minnesota site will basically be a brownfield mill with new buildings and equipment, we are continuing our planning process for both locations with a focus on Cook. Given the brownfield nature of Cook, we have initiated a more detailed engineering and design study, which will be followed by the necessary environmental permitting assessments. These are exciting times for our SmartSide business. We're fortunate to have multiple viable manufacturing options to support the demand growth being realized by our sales and marketing team, with the support of our distribution partners. With that, I'll turn the call over to Curt.