Better Ways To Build

In An Industry Ripe For Disruption, Lp Building Solutions Is Taking The Lead And Showing The Building Products Sector How It’s Done.

The North American building products industry is changing quickly. The combination of rapid gains in technology, digitization, and the drive for product innovation along with a skilled labor talent crunch could set many industry stalwarts back on their heels. Consider this February 2019 insight from McKinsey:

“Although ongoing pressures present many risks to industry incumbents, they also represent transformative opportunities to create value. A rapidly changing environment will demand new responses and ways of thinking. Leaders in the building-products industry that have traditionally excelled at operational and technical disciplines, such as engineering, will need to reframe their approaches to the industry — and themselves — and become nimble strategists.”

Having rolled out a strategic initiative that is shifting them out of the commodity space and into delivering value-added, high performance branded solutions, LP Building Solutions (NYSE:LPX) is demonstrating the essential agility required to thrive in this hyper pressurized environment.

“The timing (for this) was right because we needed to alter our course and take control of our future as a company — needed to redefine who we were going to be as a company,” explained Mike Sims, the company’s SVP of Business Development and Corporate Marketing.

In 2014, LP, then commonly known as Louisiana-Pacific, abandoned a proposed acquisition of Ainsworth Lumber that would have given the firm a greater foothold in regional oriented strand board (OSB) markets in the Pacific Northwest and Midwest. The decision proved fortuitous.

Sims continued, “Without this option we needed a new strategy to grow. As we were reflecting on our past, we realized that we had become complacent around accepting the fate of the commodity markets.