Reply #18: In this case, it was a capacity problem

[jmowreader]

All that Chinese drywall came in during the 2001-2007 McMansion boom. A drywall plant can only make so much drywall, and all the drywall plants in the US were designed around the idea that houses have 8-foot flat ceilings, not 12-foot cathedrals. If your plant can produce 1 million sf of drywall per day at maximum capacity and you're selling 1.5 million, you need to get the extra from somewhere--and, unfortunately, the "somewhere" is China.

I don't know how they made it. I did some numbers, and it turns out that if a sheet of 12-foot Chinese drywall cost $10 at the lumberyard, after paying for the ocean shipment you'd be left with somewhere around three dollars a sheet to pay EVERYTHING from the cost of the board in China to the trucks that carried the board from the port to the distribution center and from there to the lumberyard. Unless the Chinese have figured out a way to make drywall for 25 cents per sheet, you're looking at a net loss.