Gypsum industry news
Fortress buys Gyptech
29 November 2024Canada: Fortress Investment Group has acquired a majority stake in Gyptech, using funds managed by its affiliates, for an undisclosed sum. The company’s management team hold a minority stake in the business. Moelis & Company is acting as exclusive financial advisor to Fortress and Evercore is acting as placement agent to Fortress on the financing. Fortress said that the purchase will provide strategic support for Gyptech's global growth, with an emphasis on the scaling of technologies and the expansion of client services.
Jeremy McKellar, the CEO of Gyptech, commented “With Fortress' backing, we will continue to grow our aftermarket services and bring to market energy-efficient technologies that are crucial for the future of sustainable construction.”
Ben Green, Director at Fortress, added “Gyptech is a great company with a market-leading position supplying equipment that's foundational to the building construction industry across the globe. With strong demand tailwinds and a great leadership team, we're excited about the company's growth opportunities.”
Gyptech designs, engineers and builds new and replacement production lines for gypsum wallboard and asphalt-shingle facilities. It was established in 1993 and holds offices in North America and Europe.
Fortress Investment Group is a global investment manager. Founded in 1998, it manages US$49bn of assets under management as of 30 September 2024, on behalf of approximately 2000 institutional clients and private investors worldwide across a range of credit and real estate, private equity and permanent capital investment strategies.
United Mining Industries hires Gyptech for wallboard plant expansion
16 November 2023Saudi Arabia: Canada-based Gyptech has won a contract to carry out an expansion project at a gypsum wallboard plant belonging to United Mining Industries. The project is scheduled to conclude 18 months after its commencement date. Reuters has reported the value of the contract as Euro12.3m.
Time for new gypsum wallboard plants in the US
26 October 2023Georgia-Pacific officially opened its new gypsum wallboard plant at Sweetwater in Texas earlier this month. The US$325m project is situated next to the company’s existing plant at the site, Sweetwater West, on the other side of a road. Canada-based Gyptech said in 2021 that it was supplying the equipment for the new high-speed line at the site.
When Georgia-Pacific first announced the new project in 2020, it mentioned that it would be able to keep its logistics costs low, use raw gypsum reserves and the existing workforce. Despite this, the plant has still created over 100 new jobs. The company also said that it anticipated closing its 60Mm2/yr Quanah plant, also in Texas, depending upon market conditions. This came to pass in March 2023. Altogether, both plants at Sweetwater will have a production capacity of around 93Mm2/yr. This implies that the new plant has a production capacity of around 60Mm2/yr, given that the existing plant’s capacity is 30Mm2/yr. Funnily enough this is the same as the Quanah plant.
The new plant at Sweetwater may be a sign that the US wallboard market is picking up again. Georgia-Pacific has invested some serious money and it is targeting Texas, a leading area for construction nationally. However, it does come with a few caveats. Firstly, the new plant at Sweetwater is replacing existing capacity at Quanah. Secondly, it is using some of the advantages of the existing plant such as its trucks and its proximity to its customers. This suggests that the company may be wary of building a new plant in a greenfield location with all the potential risks that might involve.
US wallboard sales have regularly peaked and troughed over the decades, like many other commodity markets, as demand and production capacity race each other. Sales of wallboard peaked around the year 2000 and then again in the mid 2000s before tailing off following the 2007 recession. They have been recovering ever since and started to get close to the levels seen in the first half of the 2000s in 2022 when the United States Geological Survey (USGS) reported wallboard sales of 2.6Bnm2.
Generally, the last tranche of new wallboard plants in the US were built or approved in the late 2000s before the financial downturn. These new sites included CertainTeed’s Roxboro plant in North Carolina and the Moundsville plant in West Virginia, Gold Bond Building Products’ Mount Holly plant in North Carolina and American Gypsum’s Georgetown plant in South Carolina. From this point though various plants were either closed or mothballed. Some of the latter have been restarted as the market slowly recovered. New plant projects in the 2010s tended to be upgrades or replacements. One example of this was USG’s plan to rebuild a production line at its Jacksonville plant in Florida, which was announced in late 2017 before Knauf took over the company in 2018. Another was National Gypsum’s scheme to reopen its Wilmington plant in North Carolina in 2019. At the same time in the 2010s there were a number of mergers and acquisitions including Lafarge’s sale of its gypsum business in North America in 2013, Knauf’s takeover of USG in 2019 and Saint-Gobain’s acquisition of Continental Building Products in 2020.
When Georgia-Pacific started building the new plant at Sweetwater in 2020 this marked the start of a new phase of US wallboard plant projects. American Gypsum announced plans for an upgrade to its Albuquerque gypsum wallboard plant in 2021, Gold Bond Building Products started building its long-delayed Eloy plant in Arizona in 2022 and it said it was spending US$90m on an upgrade to its Mount Holly gypsum wallboard plant in North Carolina in 2023, and CertainTeed revealed it wanted to build a second production line at its Palatka gypsum wallboard plant in Florida also in 2023.
Congratulations are due to Georgia-Pacific for the achievement at Sweetwater. Optimism for the US market in general may also be in order given the slow but steady stream of projects that have been announced and completed since 2020. The next step, when a company builds a new wallboard plant at a greenfield site in the US, looks set to happen when Gold Bond Building Products completes its Eloy plant.
Gyptech to open new corporate office on 17 October 2013
11 October 2013Canada: Gypsum Technologies Inc (Gyptech) will officially open its new corporate headquarters in Burlington, Ontario on 17 October 2013. The global supplier of wallboard process equipment and engineering services has built a new 2040m2 headquarters to meet corporate growth objectives and long-term goals. The company's manufacturing facility will remain in Mississauga, Ontario.
"We look forward to getting into the new building where we have a modern facility and the improved quality of life that Burlington offers," said Gary Murray, President and CEO of Gyptech.