Weyerhaeuser Company on Tuesday announced an agreement to sell its 630,000 acres of timberland in Montana to a private timberland investment company for $145 million in cash.

“The sale of our Montana acreage is part of our ongoing effort to strategically optimize our timberland portfolio,” Devin W. Stockfish, president and chief executive officer of Weyerhaeuser, said in a prepared statement. “The transaction includes a diverse mix of softwood species and an existing 110,000-acre conservation easement which preserves public access in perpetuity.”

The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to be completed in the second quarter of 2020, the company said.

Weyerhaeuser’s three manufacturing facilities in the Flathead Valley are not affected by the forthcoming sale.

“Our manufacturing operations in Montana continue to deliver strong results,” Stockfish said. “Our people have done an outstanding job driving improvement in safety and operational excellence over the past several years, and they also do terrific work to support the communities where we operate.”

The national timber company operates a medium-density fiberboard plant in Columbia Falls, plus a plywood mill and sawmill in Evergreen, employing approximately 580 people locally.

The Daily Inter Lake profiled Weyerhaeuser in October during a series of stories about local manufacturers, detailing how the company has stayed competitive by investing in technology upgrades at its Flathead Valley facilities.

“We continue to work on different projects to modernize and be more efficient,” Tom Ray, the Montana region resources manager at Weyerhaeuser, told the Inter Lake in October. “We completed a large technology update at the MDF just this summer.”

Weyerhaeuser finalized its purchase of Plum Creek Timber Co. for $8.44 billion in 2016. At the time, Plum Creek officials said it would be “business as usual” for the local manufacturing plants. However, by June 2016 Weyerhaeuser announced it was closing its Columbia Falls lumber mill and plywood plant and shuttering its administrative offices in Columbia Falls.

Weyerhaeuser is one of the world’s largest private owners of timberlands. The company owns or controls approximately 12 million acres of timberlands in the United States and manages additional timberlands under long-term licenses in Canada. The company also is one of the largest manufacturers of wood products, and a real estate investment trust. In 2018, Weyerhaeuser generated $7.5 billion in net sales and employed approximately 9,300 people who serve customers worldwide.

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