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Hi Brian & All, Mar 27, 2008
Actions are sometimes more understandable if you put yourself in the
other person's shoes. The forestry industry in Eastern Canada has for
some years had extremely and increasingly uncomfortable and unprofitable
shoes.
I will illustrate with Abitibi Consolidated (AC) as I happen to have
relevant figures for that company on hand. In March of 2002 the market
was $14 per share. It merged with Bowater last fall, one merged share
(AB) being equal to 0.06261 AC share. By March 2008 AB had fallen to
$4.75 which is equal to $0.30 per share of the original AC.
This is a 47-fold decrease in value over 6 years. With 440 million
shares initially, this loss of $13.70 per share is equivalent $6028
million or to put a human face on it, just from the viewpoint of
investors, this loss is equivalent to 300,000 moms or pops who each had
to eat a capital loss of $20,000. On news that the company might yet
live to see another day the stock recently rose to $13.28, i.e. $0.83
for initial share equivalents meaning that only 290,000 moms or pops
would have to eat a loss of $20,000.
And of course the investor aspect is only a small part of the total
bleak picture which includes closed mills, broken communities, stranded
service industries and reduced or defaulted pensions.
So far as I know the Irving Forestry operation is privately owned.
So all loss must be absorbed by some configuration of the Irving
interests. And when dealing with a crop that has a 100 year growing
period between harvests, a privately owned company has only as much
wiggle room as they can invent..
The Irvings recently announced an intention to split into distinct
companies specializing in Forestry, Petrochemicals and something else I
think. This court case is just a way to buy time until the new
arrangement is final (or perhaps that is what they want everyone to
think). Either the new Forestry company is going to go bankrupt or they
want to create this expectation.
In any case those who objected to normal Forestry harvesting cycles
of about 100 years will soon look back to those times as the good old
days, as more forest land is converted back to farming or to 7-year
biomass harvesting cycles.
Yours truly, Dave Webster, Kentville
Brian Dalzell wrote:
> How hard can it be to move a logging road (or leave a few trees
> standing) to protect a colony of great blue herons? Remember, these
> are the same folks who are spending 10s of thousands of dollars to buy
> time on Global, ATV and CBC evening news to boast of moving "their"
> shipping lanes to avoid Right Whales in the Bay of Fundy. Go figure....
>
> Fritz McEvoy wrote:
>
>> Hi All,
>> I spotted this news story today and thought it would be of
>> interest to some on naturens. All the best
>> Fritz McEvoy
>> Sunrise Valley CB
>>
>>
>> http://www.cbc.ca/canada/newbrunswick/story/2008/03/25/migratory-birds.html
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Hunt for a chance to win a Mitsubishi Eclipse Spyder! Click here to
>> enter <http://g.msn.ca/ca55/211>
>
>
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