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Sahaviriya Steel Industries relights Redcar blast furnace

Their confidence may be based on naivety. They have no in-house experience of steelmaking via this process route. The finacial charges alone resulting from this investment will be of the order of $150/tonne. The World is awash with steel slabs which are available at prices much lower than can be produced by the teesside works. Slabs on the open market are being sold by companies whose capital investment has been sunk or written off, and by countries like China and the former Soviet Republics where profit is not important. The competitors of SSI in Thailand or elsewhere in South East Asia will be able to buy slabs much cheaper than those from Redcar. So unless Thailand is prepared to put up the shutters and impose strict import tariffs, SSI will not be able to compete. The location of merchant slab production facilities in the UK is not very smart. There are only 2 such plants dedicated to merchant slab production in the World; one in Brazil, and the other in Mexico. Others enter the market at times when their mills are down, and they "dump" their steel semis on the market to avoid shutting down their iron and steelmaking plants. SSI have long had a vision of being able to produce their own slabs, and they had a project to do just this when the financial crisis in the Far East in the late 1990's caused them to abandon their plans.

17 Apr 2012

7:19 pm