Southern Alps Timber Ltd
SAWMILLING · CANTERBURY
A second-generation family sawmill in Canterbury — structural framing and appearance-grade boards, revenue US$34m, roughly 60% sold to domestic merchants and 40% exported. The business buys logs and sells lumber: it earns the difference between the two, at volume, on a mill that runs two shifts. Eleven years with the bank, conduct clean.
Southern Alps Timber Ltd is a fictional construction. The figures, relationships and decisions on this page are illustrative — built for teaching, not drawn from any real borrower or transaction.
// WHAT WAS ASKED
- Existing
- US$3.0m inventory line
- Requested
- US$6.0m — roughly six months of logs against the usual three
- Decision by
- Before the winter lull
- Revenue
- US$34m, up 9%
- Log cost
- −18% over six months
- Spread per m³
- US$118, the widest in three years
- Log yard
- 92 days of cover, against the usual 75
- Utilisation
- 81%, two shifts
// WHAT THE BANK DID
Declined the stockpile and structured the throughput: the line held at normal-cycle cover, advance rates tiered by liquidity, a monthly mark-to-market on the yard — the family's view on log prices left to its equity.
The reasoning is in the file itself — the four options that were on the table, how readers answered, and the senior banker's read of the same numbers.
Nothing further is recorded here about Southern Alps Timber. This record holds published files only — when the business next appears in an issue, its entry grows.
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