Amurstal shipped Posco billet for export to Asia

The Russian Far Eastern metallurgical plant Amurstal last year shipped 1 million tons of steel billets to the South Korean company Posco International for further export to the countries of East and Southeast Asia.

Posco International exports and imports steel, cement, crude oil, heavy equipment, auto parts and textiles and is the trading arm of Posco, Korea's largest steel company.

A supply memorandum between the metallurgical enterprise and the Korean company was signed in June 2018. The partnership with Posco provides Amurstal with guaranteed sales of a significant part of its products, and the measures taken over the past two years to develop the plant, in turn, will increase production and bring the level to 1.2 million tons, says the Russian steel producer.

In general, exports to the countries of East, Southeast and South Asia account for 60% of the plant's sales, and 40% falls on the domestic market of Russia.

Amurstal is the only modern electric steel-making plant in the Far East for the processing of ferrous scrap. The company produces billets, steel for reinforcing reinforced concrete structures and other materials widely used in the construction of buildings and structures, in road construction and industry.

The plant was forced to suspend production in 2020 due to a shortage of raw materials that arose from disputes over ownership and growing debt holding back its cash flow (see Kallanish passim).

Amurstal did not provide operating and financial results for 2021. In 2019, it produced about 900,000 tonnes of billets and 350,000 tonnes of long products.

In December, Posco closed its first blast furnace, which had been in operation for 48 years. This will result in a production loss of about 1.3 million tonnes per year for the steel plant. Posco said it will increase the capacity of the remaining eight blast furnaces to offset production losses.