steel industry blog

We have just relaunched our website in a new responsive web design, for viewing on mobile phones, tablets, laptops and PCs on screen widths ranging from 240-1920 pixels. Why not check out http://www.steelonthenet.com on your preferred device, and watch the page width adapt to your screen size?

We hope this new website design will give site visitors using mobile phones and tablets especially a better user experience...

We have posted profiles for many of our steel experts on-line. With capabilities ranging from steel expert witness to steel feasibility study or due diligence support, we hope this set of consulting skills may be of use to potential clients.

The profiles may be found at http://www.steelonthenet.com/experts.html

Regards.

Dr Andrzej M Kotas
Chief Executive
www.steelonthenet.com

All the recent talk about the nationalisation of ArcelorMittal's blast furnaces at Florange reminds us of two other recent similar moves. These were;

- The planned creation in Russia of RusSpetsStal in 2007 [see our steel blog]. The new RusSpetsStal Holding was to include the assets of the Red October Steel Works, and possibly also (at one point) the special steel assets of the Cheliabinsk Steel Works [although the Cheliabinsk steel assets never did get taken over in the end]. RusSpetsStal filed for bankruptcy in August 2010. Planned optimisation of performance and expansion of output never happened, as investment in RusSpetsStal did not go to plan.

- The nationalisation of Sidor in Venezuela in 2008. This business – acquired from Techint of Argentina – has seen several changes of senior management in recent years, and reports abound in the international press about failed production targets and lack of investment.

When will the politicians finally learn that they are just no good at running business?

We have put together a list of the top five reasons for project failure in the steel industry. By 'failure', we refer to abandonment by project sponsors - for whatever reason - of investment in a major capital project.

To see our assessment of the most common causes of failure, visit our top 5 reasons for steel project failure page.

Steel consultants MCI now offer a steel plant diagnostics service, geared to performance improvement. The new service is based on comparisons of steel plant key performance indicators against international norms.

For further info, see MCI's steel KPI page.