Metalloinvest Mining and Metallurgical Holding of Alisher Usmanov and partners has postponed the expansion of its steel-rolling plant Hamriyah Steel in Sharjah (United Arab Emirates, UAE), Yury Gavrilov, director of the company for strategy, mergers and acquisitions, told RBC.
According to him, the expansion of the plant in the UAE has not yet been approved not because of Western sanctions, but because of a surplus of metal products in the local market. “This is not related to the current situation, it is solely related to the situation with demand in the local market,” Gavrilov explained.
Earlier in December 2021, Metalloinvest CEO Nazim Efendiev announced that the company would build a steel rod mill at Hamriyah Steel.
Steel rod is rolled metal in the form of a round bar. It is mainly used in construction - for fastening load-bearing structures, reinforcing reinforced concrete, manufacturing fences and nets, increasing the strength of brickwork and arranging grounding systems. Also, wire rod is used to make nails, sewing needles, cables and ropes.
Metalloinvest launched the Hamriyah Steel plant with a capacity of 1 million tons of steel reinforcement per year in 2010. Investments in the project amounted to about 150 million dollars.
Three more plants produce wire rod in the UAE — United Steel Industries with a capacity of 1.1 million tons of rebar and wire rod per year, Qatar Steel Company FZE (280 thousand tons of wire rod) and Emirates Steel (550 thousand tons of wire rod). “Another line for the production of steel rod in the UAE simply does not make sense,” a representative of ME Steel (the largest database and news about the steel market in the Middle East) told RBC. There is already a surplus of such products in this country, so wire rod has to be exported. “It is not so easy for wire rod produced in the UAE to compete in exports with products from China and Turkey, whose suppliers are quite aggressive,” the expert noted.
