Progress at Glatfelter

Glatfelter Q1 Update to be distributed in Fort Smith Chamber of Commerce Newsletter:

Greetings Fort Smith Friends and Neighbors –

As I write this update, we click over one year since announcing our purchase of the former Mitsubishi Building in Chaffee Crossing. It’s been a tremendous year of designing and renovating our new state-of-the-art facility and growing our U.S. footprint, and we are grateful for the on-going support of the Fort Smith Community. We remain motivated by the fact that strong demand exists in North America for airlaid, the engineered materials we manufacture, and the markets in which we operate support our capacity investment in Fort Smith.

Since the start of the new year, the construction phase has gotten underway, and our building renovations and manufacturing technology installations are on schedule.  Our highly specialized airlaid machinery components are beginning to arrive for installation, and our main process machine elements will arrive on-site throughout Q2 2017.  Although you may not see much happening externally, there is a great deal of civil construction work going on inside our building in preparation for the large air-conditioning units required for the airlaid manufacturing process. (As a side note, we are proud to report that these air-conditioning units were made in North America.)

To date, we have hired 13 team members for our new Fort Smith facility, and our organizational development planning and training is well underway.  Many of our new team members have been traveling to our airlaid facilities in Gatineau, Canada and Falkenhagen, Germany to learn new skills in preparation for training new team members.  We anticipate hiring most of our new Glatfelter PEOPLE in the second half of this year.  The talent levels of highly-skilled manufacturing employees in Fort Smith are meeting our expectations, and we continue to establish partnerships with local universities and schools in the Fort Smith area. We look forward to sharing the Glatfelter story at local job fairs this spring and summer.  In addition, you can learn more about Glatfelter and find our current and near-term job openings in the Careers/Fort Smith section at www.Glatfelter.com.

As we approach go-live in late 2017 / early 2018, relationships in the local area continue to strengthen.  We are now closer to key suppliers and customers, and will benefit from the tremendous talent in Fort Smith.

Thank you for welcoming Glatfelter into the Fort Smith Community.  We’ve launched a great partnership and we continue to be excited about the future.

Sincerely,

 

Chris Astley
Senior Vice President & Business Unit President, Advanced Airlaid Materials
Glatfelter