The Russian steelmaker Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works (MMK) has announced that in October this year it shipped about 250,000 mt of rolled tubular products to domestic pipe producers - up 35 percent from October 2009.
Accordingly, October saw the largest monthly shipments by MMK to Russian pipemakers in 2010 and one of the largest monthly delivery volumes in recent years. In 2008, for instance, MMK was shipping an average of 138,547 mt per month to pipemakers, while in 2009 it was delivering about 127,113 mt per month. In the first 10 months of 2010, MMK's monthly shipments of rolled tubular products to domestic pipe producers amounted to 196,593 mt on average.
MMK's major customers in the pipemaking industry are Seversky and Volzhsky pipe plants and Taganrog Metallurgical Works (all subsidiaries of TMK), Chelyabinsk Pipe Rolling Plant (ChTPZ Group) and Vyksa Steel Works (OMK Group).
In 2008-2009, MMK annually shipped over 1.6 million mt of rolled products to pipe manufacturers. In 2009, the share of hollow billets in MMK's domestic shipments grew to 37 percent compared to 26 percent a year earlier. Following its plan to increase production for the pipe industry, MMK delivered some 250,000 mt of tube sheet in October, of which over 100,000 mt were rolled at its new Mill 5000. It is forecasted that MMK will have shipped a total of 2.3 million mt of rolled steel products to pipemakers by the end of 2010.
The thick-plate Mill 5000 (with an annual capacity of 1.5 million mt) was commissioned at MMK in July 2009 to primarily produce high quality hollow billets for large diameter pipes.