Japan steelmakers to increase production

Japan steelmakers to increase production

Japan's largest steelmaker, Nippon Steel Corp is planning a Yen 40 billion ($365 million) investment to update its facilities and JFE Steel Corp cancelled its plans to halt operations at a steel sheet assembly line. According to market sources, Nippon Steel will renovate its facilities at some of its mills with blast furnaces to accomodate a wide variety of products, including steel plate and steel sheet. The updates will increase the production of semi-finished products, thereby increasing Nippon's overall output capacity. In recent years, the company has increased its annual crude steel production capacity by 2 million tons through upgrades to blast furnaces. Nippon now plans to increase its steel materials production capacity by 7% or 2 million tons in the financial year to March 2006 to meet the surge in demand. In addition, another major Japanese steel producer JFE Steel, in response to increased orders from Japanese and Southeast Asian manufacturers of home electronics, has decided to continue running a production line that produces electro-galvanized steel sheet at a mill in Chiba Prefecture in the Tokyo metropolitan region. The line was originally scheduled to be suspended in March of this year, but the firm has yet to set a new date.