Gypsum industry news

Canada: Irving Wallboard is preparing to rejoin the local gas distribution network near to its plant at Saint John in New Brunswick. The company has been offered a special low rate as an incentive to return, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. In an interview Gilles Volpé, the vice-president of Liberty Utilities, the operator of New Brunswick's gas distribution network, said that these kinds of arrangements sometimes occurred with industrial end users. The proposed deal would see it use at least 600,000GJ/yr of gas making the wallboard producer Liberty Utilities’s largest customer.

The company, which also operates under the name Atlantic Wallboard, was previously the largest individual customer on New Brunswick's public gas distribution system but it left in 2015 in a pricing dispute. It then switched to using compressed gas delivered by truck.

An application has been made to the New Brunswick Energy and Utilities Board and a full hearing into the proposal is scheduled for April 2022.

Denmark: Tentoma has launched its new XL Power gypsum wallboard packing machine. The supplier says that machine can pack up to 19m-long boards. For shorter lengths, it can stretch film for more boards per packaging cycle, increasing the packaging speed for the products by up to 25%. Tentoma built and sold its first XL Power packiaging machine to replace an orbital wrapper.

Bosnia and Herzegovina: State-owned power company RiTE Ugljevik has agreed to supply 250,000t/yr of gypsum for Beijing New Building Materials (BNBM)’s upcoming Ugljevik gypsum wallboard plant in Semberija Region. The power supplier produced 300,000t of flue gas desulphurisation (FGD) gypsum in 2022.

New Zealand: Revenue from Fletcher Building’s Building Products division rose by 9% year-on-year to US$514m in the first half to 31 December 2021 from US$471m in the same period in 2020. Earnings before interest and taxation (EBIT) fell by 6% to US$68.6m from US$64.6m. The building materials producer, distributor and construction company blamed the declining earnings on a coronavirus-related lockdown in the summer of 2021, although it noted improved performance in the following quarter. Overall group revenue and earnings grew in the reporting period.

“With improved operational performance and cost disciplines now embedded across the business, we were able to deliver a strong performance. This was despite the first quarter being heavily impacted by the up to five week-long Covid-19 stringent lockdown in New Zealand and local lockdowns in Australia which impacted EBIT,” said Fletcher Building’s chief executive officer Ross Taylor.

Fletcher Building’s subsidiary Winstone Wallboards is currently building a new 10Mm²/yr gypsum wallboard plant at Tauriko near Auckland. Commissioning is planned for the group’s 2023 financial year that starts in June 2023. Once completed the company says it will have a total national wallboard production capacity of 40Mm²/yr.

New Zealand: Winstone Wallboards has decided to move to an allocation model of supplying its GIB plasterboard products from July 2022 due to mounting lead times in manufacture. It said it would, effective immediately, not be accepting or processing new GIB plasterboard orders for July 2022 deliveries onwards. Instead it plans to assess the situation in the coming months and it anticipates moving to a process where customers order plasterboard products one month in advance.

The gypsum wallboard producer blamed the situation on significant disruption across the building industry caused by local-coronavirus-related lockdowns in August and September 2021. It said that this caused a backlog of orders. Subsequent record manufacturing output and imports were insufficient to alleviate the situation.