MWI Bureau

Primetals technologies received an order in late January to supply a 6 strand tandem cold mill (TCM) for a new plant of ShougangQian’an Electric Vehicle Electrical Steel Co., Ltd. (ShougangQian’an) in Qian’an City, Hebei Province, China.

Rashtriya Ispat Nigam Limited, the corporate entity of the Visakhapatnam Steel Plant has shut down two blast furnaces. The company had already shut down one blast furnace in March end and recently one more blast furnace has been put down. The total production per day has reduced drastically to 6,000 tonnes.

Rating Agency Crisil in its report “Melting steel - The COVID-19 pandemic is set to wreck profitability” said that the Indian economy needs to steel itself with COVID-19 casting a long shadow over a much-anticipated mild recovery in fiscal 2021. The economy is grappling with lockdown, factory shutdowns, reduced discretionary spending and delayed capex cycle along with external factors such as weak global demand, supply disruptions, and worldwide financial shocks. It said, "We expect this perfect storm to affect construction activities and automobile production, and thereby, steel demand”.

Nippon Steel Corporation, the largest steelmaker in Japan said that it will temporarily halt a blast furnace in Kimitsu in eastern Japan to cope with the slumping demand amid the coronavirus outbreak.

The iron ore demand in the domestic market has witnessed a sharp fall due to the closure of the secondary steelmaking units and decrease in the export orders amid the coronavirus outbreak around the world, making the merchant miners uncertain about the future. Mining operations in the country came to a halt despite Government exempting the sector out of the lockdown restriction so as to maintain the normalcy in the metal industries by restoring the raw materials.

JSW Steel USA plans to temporarily idle its hot-rolling mill and electric arc furnace in Ohio and is putting its pipe mill in Baytown, Texas, on care and maintenance mode as a result of slowing demand due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The basic principles for the continuous casting process are based on teeming the liquid steel vertically into a water-cooled copper mould which is open at the bottom. Heat transfer takes place from the water-cooled copper plate which solidifies the liquid steel and a solid skin/shell is formed. The skin/shell thickness increases down the length of the copper mould.

Outokumpu’s Board of Directors has appointed HeikkiMalinen as President and CEO of Outokumpu and the Chairman of the Leadership Team. Mr. HeikkiMalinen will join the company on May 1 and assume his role as the CEO on May 16, 2020. He has previously worked as CEO in Posti Group Corporation and in Pöyry PLC. Prior to these, he has held various leadership positions in UPM in the USA and in Finland. Malinen has been a member of the Outokumpu Board of Directors since 2012, and due to his appointment, he will resign from the Board at the end of April.

Switzerland Lugano based steel trader Trasteel International has taken over Officine Tecnosider of San Giorgio di Nogaro in Udine in Italy. Officine Tecnosider founding partners Giampiero Gori, Ivo Sant, Giorgio Pinto, and Ivo Conti in a letter sent to Tecnosider's 110 employees explained that the decision to cede control of the rolling mill is based on the logic of strengthening in line with aggregation and concentration trends.

Tata Steel Chief Executive and Managing Director T V Narendran in an interview with Ishita Ayan Dutt of Business Standard said “There should be some easing without compromising on the actions being taken to contain the pandemic. The country is too large and complex to be under complete lockdown for too long without harming economic activity irreparably. So, while we shouldn't compromise on the health of people, a selective easing of the situation is probably required.”