Business View Oceania | February 2021

31 32 BUSINESS VIEW OCEANIA FEBRUARY 2021 BUSINESS VIEW OCEANIA FEBRUARY 2021 www.cbconstruction.co.nz info@cbconstruction.co.nz 021 33 77 91 326 Devon Street East, New Plymouth New Zealand “Exceptional results from exceptional effort" WOODSPAN PLT PANELS physically manufacture here in New Plymouth at Taranakipine to what we thought was a real market opportunity for us. Out of that we developed PLT (parallel laminated timber) panels and we realized that with our existing manufacturing equipment we could actually start making panels straight away.” The Woodspan business gained momentum, employing quite a few specialists, and recruiting from within the Taranakipine production side and retraining the staff to running the machinery. They purchased a state-of-the- art Hundegger CNC machine out of Germany, put in all the latest technology, leased a new building for a new factory. They did prototyping and testing in the factory environment, very confident that the product would work. But they still had to build that first house. Boon admits, “Someone had to go first, so my wife and I built our own house as a test and the product performed brilliantly. We used BOON Architects and Chris Bell Construction for the design and Woodspan.” The roots of the company go back to 1954, when Rodney Jones started a business processing indigenous species of New Zealand. In early 1980, he recognized that there was a maturing crop of radiata pine (an exotic species) in the Taranaki region that was ready for harvest, so he established Taranaki Sawmills Limited in New Plymouth, as a traditional sawmilling business for timber products used in the local domestic market. Over time, the company progressed into remanufacturing or engineered wood products. Boon recalls, “When I joined the company about 14 years ago, we rebranded the name to Taranakipine that was more about the engineered wood products we were making and less about the sawmilling end of the business. Over the next 10 years, we expanded our presence in laminated products and became a specialist in the sector and the largest producer by volume in Australasia of this type of product using this form.” New automated equipment was put in place and productivity and volume rose significantly. Then about four years ago, the growing trend toward building out of mass timber in Europe and North America caught the interest of the Woodspan leadership team. The benefits of constructing buildings out of mass timber were many. Wood provides a much lower carbon footprint than steel or concrete and the prefabrication of components in factories that are then delivered to the site creates huge cost savings when it comes to labour for the build. “We decided we wanted to be part of that industry,” says Boon, “and we eventually linked what we could