May 05, 2008. /Lesprom.com/. Boise reported financial results for 1Q 2008, its first reporting period since completing the acquisition of the packaging and paper assets of Boise Cascade, L.L.C. (the "Predecessor") on February 22, 2008. EBITDA was $26.3 million for 1Q 2008. This result was negatively impacted by the estimated $20.5 million cost of the planned outage and shoe press installation at the mill in DeRidder, Louisiana, and by the transaction-related inventory revaluation of $6.5 million. These results compare with EBITDA for the Predecessor of $53.6 million in 1Q 2007 and $70.5 million in 4Q 2007. Combined sales of the Predecessor and Boise Inc. were $587.9 million for 1Q 2008, an increase of $9.2 million or 2% compared with sales of $578.7 million for 1Q 2007. Paper segment sales increased 8% in 1Q 2008 compared to 1Q 2007, driven both by higher prices and higher volumes. Increased sales in the Paper segment were partially offset by an 11% decline in Packaging segment sales in 1Q 2008 as compared to the 1Q of the prior year. This reduction was primarily driven by lower sales volumes resulting from the planned outage at the DeRidder mill. As previously announced, this planned shutdown, which was associated with a project that increased production capacity of linerboard by 50 thousand tons while reducing fuel use, resulted in 19 lost days of linerboard production and 12 lost days of newsprint production. The reduction in sales volumes was offset in part by higher linerboard and corrugated prices. "Our 1Q, which included costs associated with the closing of the transaction, held significant successes along with some unexpected challenges," said Alexander Toeldte, President and CEO of Boise Inc. "We completed the transition of the business to public ownership and strengthened our competitive position by successfully executing the outage and linerboard capacity expansion at our DeRidder mill. While we began to experience rapidly escalating input costs during the quarter, we benefitted from higher sales prices for many of our products. We look forward to getting the full financial benefit of those price increases by the end of the second quarter. We are confident that the DeRidder expansion and our investment in label and release specialty papers will be key milestones in our strategy to shift capacity to packaging-driven grades." Boise Inc. manufactures packaging products and papers including corrugated containers, containerboard, label and release and flexible packaging papers, imaging papers for the office and home, printing and converting papers, newsprint, and market pulp.