Steel company history pages

We have prepared historical profiles for ~25 leading steelmakers including ArcelorMittal, Baowu, British Steel, Evraz, Gerdau, IMIDRO, JFE Steel and Liberty House Group. This list also includes Metinvest, MMK, Nippon Steel, Nucor, POSCO, SAIL and a dozen or so other top steel producers.

To read about the history of these firms visit: https://www.steelonthenet.com/history.html

blogger@steelonthenet.com

Financing the future of British steelmaking assets

A number of press reports are commenting on the lack of interest of the UK banking sector in the future financing of British steelmaking assets. For example see http://uk.reuters.com/article/us-tata-steel-britain-banking-idUKKCN0XB2CM which comments that “Britain's biggest steel business is such an unattractive prize that most major investment banks are not even angling for the opportunity to advise potential buyers on one of the year's highest profile deals”.

In my own experience, if the investment decision is attractive, the financing decision usually follows. The reluctance of the UK banking sector to get involved with financing any restructuring of British steelmaking assets is therefore telling me that more work needs to be done on the investment decision itself – i.e. on developing an attractive vision of future UK steelmaking – a vision which is cost-competitive and which will prove viable over the longer term.

I will in the coming days be posting some further thoughts on how this might be achieved at sites such as Port Talbot in South Wales.

Andrzej M Kotas, MBA

Managing Director

Metals Consulting International Limited

Website: www.steelonthenet.com

British steel - cost of tidal power

Some press reports are suggesting that Liberty Commodities’ plan for Port Talbot is to use electric arc furnaces (rather than blast furnace steelmaking), with the electric power coming from the Swansea Bay tidal lagoon.

Is this credible?

The UK’s cost of power at ~9p per kWh is already almost double that of continental Europe, where is it ~5p per kWh. Yet the cost of power from the Swansea tidal scheme is said to be several times above the normal wholesale price electricity. See https://www.theengineer.co.uk/your-questions-answered-tidal-lagoons/

If this is so, investment in electric arc furnaces at Port Talbot with use of tidal power cannot lead to a viable long-term solution for steel production in south Wales.

For further reports on the future of steelmaking in the UK, visit http://www.steelonthenet.com/feeds/uk.php

Andrzej M Kotas

Steel company history

We have posted some pages with company history for selected steelmakers in the Knowledge Base section of our website. These pages cover historic developments [including mergers, acquisitions where relevant] at ArcelorMittal (incl Mittal Steel), Baosteel, British Steel (later Corus), Evraz Group, Nippon Steel, Nucor, POSCO and the Riva Group. Further historical profiles will follow in the coming weeks.

 

blogger@steelonthenet.com