Metals Chips
By Tom Stundza -- Purchasing, 12/11/2008 2:00:00 AM
Russel Metals of Mississauga, Ontario, has bought Norton Metal Products, a family-owned metals service center in Fort Worth, Texas, which sells $70 million annually of merchant bars and plate to industrial manufacturing and non-residential construction. Russel Metals is the fifth largest service center chain in North America with 2007 sales of $3.15 billion.
U.S. Steel Corp.'s new $450 million coke plant in Sumter County, Ala., is being delayed "until stormy economic conditions clear."
Timken has opened its new $60 million small-bar steel mill in Canton, Ohio. The new 76,000 square-foot steel mill will produce alloy bars down to one inch in diameter, meeting growing North American demand for this smaller size range of bar products
Novolipetsk Steel (NLMK) of Russia has completed the purchase of mini-mill Beta Steel of Portage, Ind., for $350 million. Beta operates an electric furnace melt shop with 770,000 metric tons/year of capacity and a hot-strip mill with 1.2 million tons capacity.
Marmon/Keystone expects to open this month its new Sioux Falls, S.D., carbon and stainless steel and aluminum tubulars and bar products warehouse and regional office complex. The Sioux Falls operation will service customers in South Dakota, western Minnesota, northwest Iowa and northeast Nebraska.
NASA has certified Alcoa's Davenport, Iowa, facility as the only U.S. supplier to produce aluminum-lithium alloy 2195 thin plate for the Ares 1 crew launch vehicle. That's the rocket that will enable astronauts to explore space beyond low earth orbit with the goal of reaching the moon by 2020.
Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold plans to reduce production from its Henderson, Colo., primary molybdenum mine and to defer the restart of the Climax molybdenum mine near Leadville, Colo., in response to the recent sharp decline in molybdenum prices. Phoenix-based Freeport-McMoRan says moly has dropped in price by 60% lately because of reduced demand for the alloying metal used in strengthening steel.
In reaction to a global downturn in demand, Commercial Metals Co. (CMC) of Irving, Texas, is reducing output in the U.S. and Poland. The steelmaker and scrap processor now is at 70% capacity in the U.S. and at 85% at its high-quality wire rod mill in Poland.
Secondary aluminum alloy producers Spectro Alloys of Rosemount, Minn., and Arkansas Aluminum Alloys of Hot Springs, Ark., have called off their merger into ALX Recycling because of collapsed demand. In addition, AAA will temporarily shut its smelting operations, taking out of production some 160 million lb/year of aluminum alloy.
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