Boise Cascade Corp

Boise Cascade Corp. said Monday that it was exiting the paper, building products and timberland businesses and selling the assets for about $3.2 billion in cash to focus on its office supply operation. The businesses are being sold to private equity firm Madison Dearborn Partners, which created a company called Boise Cascade and will hire Boise Cascade Corp.'s management and a portion of its 55,000 employees. Formed nearly 50 years ago, Boise Cascade Corp.

Boise Cascade Corp., the fourth-largest maker of wood and paper products in the U.S., agreed to buy office products retailer OfficeMax Inc. for $1.15 billion and said it might seek a buyer for some of its businesses later this year. Shareholders in OfficeMax, the No. 3 U.S. office supply retailer, would get $9 a share in cash and stock, the firms said. The purchase of Shaker Heights, Ohio-based OfficeMax would more than double annual sales at Boise's office products distribution unit to $8.

The finicky U.S. market for initial public offerings could pose a challenge for this week's largest deal, the $400-million IPO of paper and forest products company Boise Cascade Co. The name is a familiar one to investors, but the Boise Cascade that is going public is a restructured version of the old one. This time, it is controlled by a private equity company.

There's a surefire recipe for IPO disaster circulating on Wall Street this spring: Take a quick private equity turnaround, mix in lots of debt and award most of the proceeds to the prior owners. Those have been the ingredients in some of the market's biggest initial public offering flops lately, and investors are wondering whether they're going to be served another indigestible helping this week in the form of Boise Cascade Co.

Boise Cascade Co., a wood and paper producer owned by Madison Dearborn Partners and OfficeMax Inc., on Wednesday canceled an initial public offering of stock, after earlier cutting the price of the offering. Because of changing market conditions, it wasn't in the interest of existing shareholders to proceed with the stock sale, the Boise, Idaho-based company said in a statement. Boise Cascade and Madison Dearborn had hoped to sell 16 million shares this week.

This is America's timber country. The rolling green carpets that sweep into the mountains are home both to 28 million acres of commercial forest and to the largest stand of old-growth timber in the world. Most people here in Douglas County have never thought twice about cutting a few trees--not surprising in a place where unemployment is at 11% and a third of the jobs left are linked to the forest.

Boise Cascade Corp. has signed an agreement to install Enterprise Labor, a labor management software system from jeTech Data Systems of Camarillo. Headquartered in Boise, Idaho, Boise Cascade distributes office products and building materials and is a manufacturer of paper and wood products. Once it is fully deployed, the software will process time and labor information for about 18,000 Boise Cascade employees.