Major Ukrainian steel producer Metinvest will strengthen its presence in the European market by increase of sales of high-value added products, especially flat steel, according to Dmytry Nikolaenko, the company’s sales director.
Metinvest’s strategy in Europe includes construction of service centres, organic growth and expansion of the operation of re-rolling units which the company already owns in Europe, and increasing the quality of flat steel products in Ukraine, which can also be potentially sold to Europe.
At the moment, Metinvest owns four production units in Europe: the plant in Bulgaria is focused on long steel production, while two mills in Italy and one in the UK are flat steel producers (mainly supplying plates). Overall production at the European re-rolling mills of Metinvest is almost 2 million mt per year, Dmytry Nikolaenko said.
Moreover, Metinvest has almost finished modernization at Ilyich SW in Ukraine. The project aims to enhance Ilyich Steel’s product mix by increasing the weight of hot rolled coils from an average of 15 mt to 27 mt, as well as by reducing the minimum thickness to 1.2 mm and allowing production of coils with widths ranging from 900 mm to 1,600 mm. Metinvest said that the project will increase productivity from 1.36 million mt to 2.5 million mt per year. The production of big coils will be launched at Ilyich SW on November 5, as SteelOrbis reported earlier.
It is worth mentioning that the European HRC market has been limited for the Ukrainian producer due to the import duty of €60.5/mt, which is why imports of hot rolled wide strip from Ukraine into the EU totalled just 93,000 mt in the first eight months of 2019.