Business View Magazine | March 2021

53 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE MARCH 2021 ATCO WOOD PRODUCTS day basis because demand had evaporated and pricing was down. It was challenging.” By June, though, things were starting to look up as the wood industry began shrugging off the effects of the pandemic. “The last five months of 2020 were spectacularly strong with demand outpacing supply across our industry,” says Weatherford. He suspects the reason behind this growth is that people are renovating and remodeling their living spaces to accommodate the new norm of working from home. The strong demand has continued into 2021, and Weatherford hopes the trend will continue, despite vaccine jitters and other lingering questions surrounding a post-pandemic world. For Weatherford, a primary concern is how the pandemic will permanently reshape the world and how these changes will impact the wood industry. Semeniuk is equally cautious. “Many mills and several of our competitors ran into significant people shortages because of COVID-19,” he says. “Also, most mills shut down at the height of the pandemic, significantly reducing supply that the industry must now try to catch up with.” In addition to contending with pandemic- related challenges, small family-owned timber companies like ATCO have a different and perhaps more pressing challenge in British Columbia. Weatherford admits, “Consolidation in the forestry industry in British Columbia has taken off over the last 20 years, making it difficult for small, independent family businesses like ours to continue to survive. But our response to this at ATCO is to continue investing heavily in the business while remaining agile enough to adjust to market changes quickly. We plan to continue growing from a value-addition perspective. That means improvements in safety and energy efficiency while creating higher- value products that improve our utilization of the timber we harvest from our forests.”