Plum Creek stock hits an all-time high

Hungry Horse News

You know that old adage, buy low, sell high? Well you should have bought some Plum Creek stock last year when it was in the dumper.

This year, the company's stock will likely end the year on its highest note ever.

Plum Creek stock Tuesday was trading a $39 a share-the highest in company history. That's up about $6 a share since September, and it's way up from $26 a share last October.

Plum Creek has had a good year, both locally and nationally. It's third quarter earnings were up 71 percent at $77 million.

Earnings for the first nine months of the year were $289 million.

That's indicative of the wood products industry as a whole, said John Anderson, publisher of Random Lengths, a trade publication.

"The wood products industry has been very, very strong," he said.

His publication tracks several publicly traded wood products companies, and "a good lot of them are at 52-week highs."

The demand for wood products has been pushed by a strong housing market.

Locally, Plum Creek's manufacturing segment, which includes mills in Columbia Falls and throughout Montana, showed an operating profit of $23 million for the third quarter.

Last year, the company was dogged by wildfires in Montana, and the manufacturing segment actually lost $2 million in the third quarter.

Also boosting company coffers is Plum Creek's real estate segment, which reported revenue of $42 million compared to $28 million in the third quarter of 2003.

Its fourth quarter earnings should be released about the last week of January.

As of late, Plum Creek has been more and more involved in real estate sales-selling off chunks of real estate for development purposes where they fetch a far higher price than if they were just timberland.

The company has sold several parcels here in Montana that have been developed or are slated for residential development.

But it isn't just selling off land, either.

Earlier this month, the company announced it had signed an agreement to purchase 48,500 acres of timberland in Maine's Moosehead Lake and Sebec regions.

The deal will bring Plum Creek's land ownership in that state to 953,000 acres. It bought about 900,000 acres of timber there in 1998.

Plum Creek owns about 8 million acres across 21 states, including 1.5 million acres here in Montana.