After 31 years of being the main shareholder of the giant steel company Altos Hornos de México (AHMSA), the Mexican politician and businessman Alonso Ancira Elizondo lost the company and now its administration is in the hands of the trustee to sell its assets free of liabilities due to the state of bankruptcy declared on November 6 by a federal judge.
“In compliance with the legal provisions established within the framework of the bankruptcy process of AHMSA, on December 11 at 10:00 a.m., Víctor Manuel Aguilera Gómez formally took possession of the administration and assets of the company in his capacity as Trustee,” AHMSA reported in a press release.
After two failed debt restructuring processes worth millions, in 1999 and 2024, on November 6, one of the largest steel companies in Latin America with a capacity of 5.5 million metric tons (mt) of steel and its own iron mining complexes, was declared bankrupt.
With AHMSA under the administration of the trustee (auxiliary of the judicial power), “the orderly liquidation process begins, which has as its main objective to obtain the best offer for the sale of the company's assets.”
The most recent public financial data of AHMSA, seen by SteelOrbis, is from 2022 and shows that AHMSA had assets of just over $2.0 billion and liabilities of almost $3.0 billion. However, this year the Servicio de Administración Tributaria (like the US Internal Revenue Service, IRS) declared tax debts to AHMSA and its mining arm Minera del Norte (Minosa) for another $3.0 billion.
However, with the bankruptcy status, the trustee will sell the assets without liabilities (labor or financial).
In October, SteelOrbis reported that the Italian-Argentinian giant Techint, owner of Ternium, ArcelorMittal, a Brazilian steel company, a Canadian steel company and the Mexican Villacero did a due diligence on AHMSA.
Villacero is the company that sold La Siderúrgica Lázaro Cárdenas Las Truchas (Sicartsa) to ArcelorMittal in 2006 for more than $1.4 billion. It is a steel and mining complex in the western city of Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán.
Sources of information consulted by SteelOrbis have commented that they intend to sell AHMSA in a single package. That is, the steel company with its iron mining complexes. Although at first, the reactivation of steel production would be through its electric arc furnace (EAF) with an annual production capacity of 1.2 million mt. Production through the blast furnace would be done later.
The operation of the EAF would reactivate the hot sheet mill and the “Steckel mill” for the production of steel plate in sheet and coil.
It is important to mention that the now former shareholders of AHMSA are still pending to hand over the administration of Minosa to the trustee, which was declared bankrupt last May.