After a prolonged, rancorous 14 months, Willamette Industries agreement to a $6.1 billion takeover by Weyerhaeuser Co. The agreement, Monday, Jan. 21, has Weyerhaeuser paying $55.50 per share for its smaller rival.
Willamette’s board of directors will consider the deal before the end of this month. The decision to accept the offer also resulted in the company ending its negotiations to acquire Georgia-Pacific’s building products division.
Weyerhaeuser is the nation's third-largest timber products company, and Willamette is the seventh-biggest.
Weyerhaeuser, with an estimated $15.6 billion in 2001 sales, already is the largest private owner of softwood timber in the world, managing 38 million acres of owned, leased and licensed forest in the United States and Canada.
Willamette, by comparison, owns just 1.7 million acres of timberland but it has 105 mills in the United States, France, Ireland and Mexico. Estimated sales for 2001 are $4.6 billion.