South Korean steelmaker POSCO has announced that at a board meeting on November 19 it decided to build a hot rolling mill No. 4 at its Gwangyang works and also to build a new cold rolling mill in India.
Accordingly, the Gwangyang No. 4 hot rolling mill, the construction of which is to commence in September 2011 and be completed by January 2014, will produce 3.3 million mt of HR steel products per year to cover the deficit in materials for the cold rolling industry in the country. The surplus materials will be exported to overseas subsidiaries and customers in Southeast Asia and Western Asia. Following the completion of the No.4 hot rolling mill, POSCO's production capacity for HRC will increase from 23.54 million mt to 26.84 million mt per year.
"Once the No.4 hot rolling mill is completed, it will replace supply of the imported high-quality steel from overseas like Japan," reads POSCO's release, which also forecasts an increase in the demand for HR products.
Meanwhile, the cold rolling mill, which will be built at the Vile Bhagad Industrial Complex in Maharastra, India, will produce 1.8 million mt of high quality CR steel plates per year, concentrating on automobile steel plates. The construction of the mill will start in November 2011 and end in December 2013. The HR products used in this mill will be supplied from the Gwangyang No. 4 hot rolling mill for the most part.
Maharastra is the industrial capital of India, producing 45 percent of automobiles and 40 percent of electronic appliances in the country. By 2018, the demand for CR steel products in the automobile and other industries of India is expected to have increased gradually by 12.5 percent.
"The supply of CR plate for automobiles is expected to be short by 850,000 mt in 2015 and by 1.78 million mt by 2018, making the future prospects for the market very bright," said POSCO in its statement.