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Canfor turns trees into lumber, engineered wood, pulp, paper, wood pellets, and green energy, and sells those products to builders and manufacturers around the world.
Canfor is a forest products company. It cuts down trees and turns them into the basic building blocks of a house: the lumber that frames walls and roofs, and engineered wood products like the strong beams and panels that hold up floors and big open spaces. It also runs pulp mills that make the mushy raw material for paper and packaging, plus plants that press sawdust and scraps into wood pellets burned for heat and power. Almost everything it makes gets sold to someone else鈥攂uilders, retailers, paper makers, and power plants鈥攎ostly in the United States, Canada, and Asia.
The business rises and falls with lumber prices, and that is the whole story in a nutshell. When American homebuilding is hot, lumber prices jump and Canfor's sawmills make fat profits. When construction slows, prices crash and the same mills can lose money. On top of that, Canfor has fought a long, bitter trade war with the United States, which slaps heavy duties on Canadian softwood lumber, money Canfor pays and has to fight to get back. That fight has cost the company real cash and shaped where it builds and buys mills. Canfor is majority-owned by a holding company controlled by Jim Pattison, one of Canada's wealthiest businessmen, which gives it a steady long-term owner but also means public shareholders own a minority stake. The company has been shrinking its pulp business and pouring money into engineered wood, betting that mass-timber construction鈥攂ig buildings made from wood instead of steel and concrete鈥攚ill grow. It has also bought mills in the United States and Sweden to spread its bets beyond Canada's borders and beyond its trade problems.
The industry is full of heavyweights. West Fraser Timber is a big Canadian rival, and privately held giants like Georgia-Pacific and Weyerhaeuser compete for the same trees and the same lumber buyers. The simple truth about Canfor is that it is a price-taker selling a commodity: it cannot set the price of a two-by-four, so its fortunes swing with housing markets, interest rates, and trade politics. That makes it a cyclical, gritty business鈥攑rofitable in the good years, painful in the bad, and always at the mercy of whether Americans are building houses.
Saved answer 路 last researched 15 Nov 2026