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James Moss

After 20-some years consulting I'm still fascinated by the problems of strategy development in this basic industry, especially now that it stands at the center of an industrial revolution like no other. You can read more about me here.

Posts by James Moss

NLMK Briefing on John Maneely Acquisition

August 25, 2008

Here is an excellent profile of pipe and tube maker John Maneely (JMC) in PDF format produced by NLMK at the time of their acqusition of JMC on August 12, 2008. It provides some very interesting detail on the size and shape of some of JMC’s major tube markets in the US. Click on the link below to open […]

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Novolipetsk buys Tube Operations for $3.5Bn

August 13, 2008

For those looking for more details on today’s NLMK acquisition of the John Maneely tube operations from Carlyle, Bloomberg has a good piece here. It looks like they paid about $1,665/ton for operations generating about $230/ton of EBITDA. Here are some of the salient details from the Bloomberg article: In the year ended June 30, […]

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World’s largest steel producers in 2007

July 16, 2008

Here’s an update of the IISI’s list of the world’s largest steelmakers in 2007 in a form you can do something with. The data on the 2006 tab is from Metal Bulletin and has their list for 2005.  

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ArcelorMittal launches Clean Technology VC Fund

July 11, 2008

As if in response to point 5 of this article on how to respond to high steel prices, ArcelorMittal is putting money into a venture capital fund investing in clean technologies in addition to establishing a carbon fund to generate carbon credits that will help in complying with the EU Emissions Trading Scheme. The venture […]

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Scrap or Pig – Iron is Iron

June 18, 2008

It used to be the case that minimills (scrap buyers) and integrated mills (iron ore buyers) had very different cost structures. Integrated steel producers’ costs were relatively fixed because iron ore and coking coal were sold on an annual contract basis and did not change much year to year. Scrap prices on the other hand, […]

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High steel prices tell us what to do

June 9, 2008

Martin Wolf, as he often does, wrote an interesting column in the Financial Times recently called The market sets high oil prices to tell us what to do. As $1,000/ton steel becomes an accepted fact of life it’s worth asking what the market is telling us to do about high steel prices. Martin Wolf offers […]

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