Steel Strip

Stelco Inc. , the steelmaker based in Hamilton, Canada that emerged from bankruptcy-court protection earlier this year, is cutting 15 per cent of its workforce after winning a new four-year contract with some of its employees. The approximately 700 job cuts will be achieved through retirements, attrition, a salaried and hourly employee buyout plan and [...]

As reported yesterday, shares in Arcelor were suspended as the regulators demanded to know what the position was regarding Mittal, following an apparent announcement that Arcelor had agreed merger terms with Severstal.

Now it is somewhat odd to make public the details of a deal with Severstal, when negotiations are ongoing with Mittal, but [...]

A Steel processing plant has quashed reports that its staff could face redundancy because of a bitter takeover battle.The Welbeck Steel Services Centre, River Road, Barking, this week denied the facility would close with the loss of up to 70 jobs.
The plant’s parent company Arcelor is involved in an ongoing £17billion hostile takeover battle [...]

LUXEMBOURG (Reuters) - Shares in takeover target Arcelor  were suspended on Wednesday while directors of the steel group held a board meeting in Luxembourg, pending a statement from the company.
French regulators asked the company, fighting off a 22.7 billion euro bid from Mittal Steel  and wanting to merge with Russia’s Severstal , to clarify the [...]

MOSCOW -(Dow Jones)- Russian coal and steel producer Evraz Group SA isn’t in talks to merge with U.K.-based Corus Group and has no plans to do so, an Evraz manager said Tuesday.
Andrei Teterkin, head of strategy at Evraz, told a conference: “We are not in any talks about any sort of potential joining [...]

Income from the football World Cup, according to one analyst, could add one-third of 1 percent to Germany’s gross domestic product this year. But while football fans from around the world gather in Germany this month to follow their national teams, other factors are helping to propel the country’s steel industry and its domestic market [...]

LONDON, June 20 — The Russian billionaire Aleksei Mordashov changed the terms today under which he would buy a big stake in the European steel giant Arcelor, in an effort to salvage a deal that is facing increasing opposition from shareholders.
Mr. Mordashov said that he was now planning to acquire a stake of just [...]

A report by A.S. Firoz in the Indian Financial Express has an article on steel pricing in the subcontinent that explains why prices there have failed to rise to the extent seen in Europe and North America. It is certainly not due to a lack of growth in the manufacturing sector, or demand for steel [...]

World crude steel production for the 62 countries reporting to the International Iron and Steel Institute was 104.131 million tons in May 2006, which is 9.3% higher than for the same month of 2005. The production during January to May 2006 amounted to 488.764 million tonnes an increase of 7% over corresponding period of 2005.
The [...]

The board of Arcelor, the pan-European steel group fighting off a hostile €22bn (£15bn) bid from its rival Mittal, is increasingly reconciled to losing a key element of its defence strategy at the hands of shareholders this week and is desperately searching for alternatives.Arcelor investors, who are angry at the terms of the proposed merger [...]