Business View Magazine | Volume 8, Issue 9

122 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 8, ISSUE 9 important pillars, and we work hard to ensure they all love doing business with us. Many of our supply, customer, and employee relationships are decades old and are built on our unwavering focus on cultivating good, strong, two-way relationships.” When it comes to the impact of COVID-19 on the forest products industry, Rhone pulls no punches. He maintains, “It’s certainly been a crazy marketplace with significant spikes in the price of lumber. The main reason we are seeing this is that lumber as a commodity was underappreciated for a very long time, and it was due for a reset in terms of valuation as a commodity. There have been several commodity price spikes over the last few decades like oil and copper but lumber never really participated in any of those. Up until a couple of years ago, the average price of the two by four was roughly like what it was in the ‘80s in real dollars, so it was due for a reset.” He explains further that while nobody could have predicted the last 18 months, the market seems to have established that price reset. “Even though price will readjust over the coming months, I don’t see the price of wood in North America returning to the lower average seen at the start of the pandemic.” On the demand side, some strong fundamentals are supporting continued demand, especially from the retail sector despite emerging supply chain bottlenecks. Rhone adds, “At the height of the pandemic, sawmills and logistics companies pared down their operations, while demand from residential customers rose. The resulting supply- demand imbalance meant everyone wanted a limited supply of wood, which drove prices up. Although lumber supply has increased over the last few months, shortages of other items like screws, nails, and joists has further chocked the supply chain.” It’s anticipated that construction industry metrics