John Williams, chairman of forest products company Paper Excellence and Domtar president, in Montreal on Nov. 29, 2023.Evan Buhler/The Globe and Mail
Paper Excellence Group, the privately held pulp and paper maker that now controls a commanding share of Canada’s forest products sector, is adopting Domtar as its business name as it moves on from past controversies and hunts for new growth in a challenged industry.
The Richmond, B.C.-based company, owned by Jackson Widjaja, the grandson of an Indonesian-Chinese billionaire, is rebranding as Domtar this week in tandem with a new mission statement. After completing three major takeovers over the past five years, the company hopes the new identity, centred on the most storied name among its three main businesses, will serve to fire up its 14,000 employees in Canada and the United States and rally other stakeholders.
“This is us saying, ‘Look, we’ve put the wings on the airplane now,’ ” said industry veteran John Williams, a former Domtar chief executive officer who is now the company’s non-executive chairman. “We’re organized. We’re ready. We’ve got the people in place, we’ve got the structures in place, and here we go.”
Updating the company’s name and image underscores Mr. Widjaja’s desire to get his employees thinking about how to generate growth, both by increasing efficiency and pivoting to new opportunities. It also reflects a broader effort to improve the corporation’s social licence by being “as thoughtful and sensitive” around community relationships and government interactions as it can be, Mr. Williams said in a recent interview with The Globe and Mail.
Paper Excellence launched with a single pulp mill in Saskatchewan 15 years ago. But its recent acquisition binge has put it squarely under the spotlight.
The company has consolidated a big piece of Canada’s forest products sector in short order. It bought British Columbia’s Catalyst Paper Corp. in 2019, then Montreal-based Domtar Corp. in 2021 and finally Resolute Forest Products Inc. in a deal that closed last year.
That quick growth has generated concern, particularly from environmental groups who say the company’s documented ties to the Widjaja family’s other holdings, specifically Sinar Mas and APP (run by Mr. Widjaja’s father), bodes ill for Canada because of APP’s poor environmental record.
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Others have warned of the dangers posed by a foreign company controlling such a vast swath of Canada’s pulp and paper sector. An investigative report on Paper Excellence published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists last year cited an unnamed whistle-blower who called the company’s rapid North American expansion a “fibre grab” to feed demand in China.
Paper Excellence executives have acknowledged that Mr. Widjaja received logistical and administrative assistance from other family businesses for his company in its early days, but they say that help has stopped and that it’s a completely independent entity now. They say the concern that the company is simply a conduit for Canadian wood fibre going to China is wrong.
After reports by The Globe and other media outlets last year highlighted Paper Excellence’s growing influence, the House of Commons natural resources committee struck a mandate to hear from executives and seek reassurances from government bureaucrats regarding the due diligence done on its takeovers.
Lawmakers also invited Mr. Widjaja to appear, but he declined the invitation. Members of Parliament could issue a summons to have him appear before them, but it would only be enforceable if Mr. Widjaja were to enter Canada.
Observers say the optics of a wealthy overseas businessman unwilling to show his face in Canada to answer basic questions about his ownership do the company no favours. Mr. Williams insists his boss has nothing to hide, however – that he’s just an introvert by nature.
Mr. Widjaja is getting more comfortable with the idea that he needs to open up, Mr. Williams says. The owner visited a Paper Excellence sawmill on a trip to the United States, where two of his three children go to school, according to the chairman. And he also met with Canadian diplomats in Indonesia. He’ll soon have a LinkedIn profile, too, Mr. Williams said.
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“He will be, I think, more visible” going forward, he said. “What he’s learned is if you don’t have a narrative, the narrative gets filled in by third parties.”
Paper Excellence is pivoting in other ways as well as it gets bigger, becoming “more pragmatic” in its dealings with outside parties, Mr. Williams said. The company agreed in April to end a long-running legal feud its Resolute unit had with environmental activist group Greenpeace over forest practices.
A month later, it reached a settlement with the government of Nova Scotia regarding the company’s contentious plans to transform and reopen a pulp mill in the town of Pictou. The parties agreed on a deal that resolves lawsuits and settles debt owed to the province while exploring the feasibility of a new, modern mill three hours away in Liverpool.
“We’re getting much better, I think, at some of the relationships that we found have been a little bit challenging up to this point, and I think it’s just an exciting new beginning,” Mr. Williams said. “If we don’t find new things to do with the asset base, we and those communities in which we operate will be inevitably in decline.”
Domtar will maintain its corporate offices in Fort Mill, S.C., as well as those in Richmond and Montreal, the manufacturer said in a statement. There will be no changes to the company’s physical location or production footprint, it added.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story included an incorrect total for Domtar's employee count. This has been updated to 14,000 employees.