SAF-West's New Redding Facility will Serve Asian Market Better
September 30, 2011

By Sahely Mukerji, smukerji@glass.com

Huber Street Properties' (HSP) recent purchase of a facility for Southern Aluminum Finishing (SAF)-West in Redding, Calif., will help SAF to serve Asia in a more timely manner, says James McClatchey, vice president of SAF. HSP is a closely related entity to SAF.

"As far as commercial construction is concerned, China is the strongest market," he says. "We just shipped a container of fabricated aluminum to China three weeks ago. The new location will make our delivery time faster to Asia, as that market develops further."

SAF-West serves Western U.S., Canada and Pacific Rim markets with architectural aluminum distribution, fabrication and finishing services.

HSP is owned by the four McClatchey brothers, says Penn McClatchey, vice president of SAF. "It owns all the McClatchey properties. It's a four-way partnership, and SAF is owned by three brothers. The N. Valley bank foreclosed on the Redding property and Huber bought it."

The Redding facility currently doesn't anodize, Penn McClatchey says. "It's a 20,000-square-foot facility, and we distribute and have a sheet metal fabricating facility," he says. "We will add an anodizing line and occupy an additional 50,000 square feet. We will also employ another 50 people in the next few years." The new line is expected to run next summer, and have a capacity of 6 million pounds a year or 6 million square feet a year, he says. "We'll build some of the machines and purchase others."

HSP also plans to upgrade the building to attract new tenants for the facilities not operated by SAF. "Ideally we'll find tenants that would be suppliers or customers," Penn McClatchey says. "An example of an ideal tenant would be an extruder who can supply our extrusions. This could further improve our delivery times, especially on large orders."

"We want to be the fastest provider of every product that we market, and want to be the technology leader in the industry," James McClatchey says. "The secret to our success is diversification across geography and market."

"We do not offer many proprietary products," says Penn McClatchey. "Rather, we strive to be open-source and provide our customer with the ability to control their own destiny. The key to our growing anodized sheet and extrusion sales are rapid delivery and quality products. The Redding facility will give us the ability to reach our western customers with the same next-day-out service on our catalog items."

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