Business View Magazine | April 2021

52 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE APRIL 2021 High Performance Resins for Adhesives & Bonding Innovative Solutions Engineered and Manufactured for over 75 years www.lrbgchemicals.com • USA 800-626-2557 • Canada 450-928-3688 Amino Resins • Phenolic Resins • Splicer Adhesives • Custom Blends • Melamine • Powders and Liquid in Balmoral, New Brunswick. According to Tardif, “After divestiture of the lumber division in 2018, we wanted to expand the company across North America in different areas east to west. Therefore, in 2019, we acquired a small staining company in the neighborhood of Boston, where most of our stained shingles are now finished for the northeast market. It just made sense to be centrally located to that market for fast response and delivery of orders.” In June 2020, Maibec acquired CanExel, the most popular wood siding brand in Quebec. CanExel is a pre-finished composite wood siding company formerly owned by Louisiana Pacific and based near Halifax, Nova Scotia. Now branded as Maibec CanExel, the Maibec team is ramping up to expand that product’s popularity across Canada and into the U.S. For years, U.S. distributors were requesting that Maibec add western red cedar shingles to its offering. Along with its cousin, northern white cedar, western red cedar is the most naturally durable species in the country with an enviable palette of colors. Seeing an ideal growth opportunity, in early December 2020 Maibec acquired Stave Lake Cedar Mills Incorporated in Dewdney, British Columbia – a small finisher of western red cedar shingles. That will become the base of Maibec’s expansion in western Canada. By producing solid wood siding from that area, with the different western species, they aim to cover the western U.S. market and eventually stretch to the northeast where the market already exists for these products. “The western red cedar is coming from larger trees,” says Tardif, “so we can produce larger shingles from that and a rich variety of reddish hues. It is used for a different pattern of homes than the northern white cedar – so those two shingles meet the requirement of different markets and do not compete against each other.