Swedish specialty steel producer SSAB has announced that it will idle one of the blast furnaces in Raahe at the end of November this year in order to achieve further reductions of cost and capacity. The blast furnace has an annual capacity of 1.3 million mt. The producer has already idled a smaller blast furnace of 500,000 mt in its Oxelösund plant and production rates were reduced on several lines in the third quarter to lower its costs, with temporary lay-offs also introducing.
Saying that it saw a more pronounced seasonal slowdown than normal towards the end of the year, the company announced that its operating profit for the third quarter of the year totaled SEK 300 million ($31.25 million) compared to the SEK 1.3 billion in the third quarter of 2018 due to lower performance at its European assets.
Meanwhile, the producer said that demand for its products weakened in the third quarter, particularly in Europe, while its margins declined due to higher iron ore costs. The company said that iron ore prices decreased during the latter part of the third quarter and will lead to lower raw material costs for SSAB Europe during the fourth quarter.