Steel Tech Buys CMP’s Cold-Rolled Strip Plant
Steel Technologies Inc., Louisville, Ky., has agreed to acquire Cold Metal Products Co. Inc.’s cold-rolled strip facility in Ottawa, Ohio, and other assets for about $10 million, following the Feb. 27 approval by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court.

The acquisition includes all the land, building and steel processing equipment at the Ottawa facility, as well as selected inventory, finished goods and accounts receivable. Included in the sale is certain equipment located in CMP’s Indianapolis facility.

“The Ottawa facility was expanded in 1996 and has a broad range of rolling, annealing and oscillating capabilities,” says Bradford T. Ray, Steel Technologies’ chairman and CEO. “This facility has an excellent reputation for its ability to produce and service high-quality, cold-rolled strip for precision applications. This operation will broaden our capabilities and complement our other cold-rolled strip facilities.”

The company intends to reestablish supply with historical customers and grow with its existing customer base as it returns the Ohio plant to full capacity.

“This purchase is another step in our continuing efforts to expand the product range and value we bring to the marketplace,” Ray says. “We expect a quick transition as we fold the Ottawa location into the Steel Technologies network of facilities.”

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Macsteel USA Acquires Regal Steel Supply
Macsteel Service Centers USA Inc., Chicago, has acquired the business and assets of Regal Steel Supply, Stockton, Calif. Terms of the purchase were not disclosed.

As a result of the acquisition, Regal Steel will operate as a Macsteel Service Centers USA division under its existing name and current Regal managers.

Regal Steel Supply was owned jointly by the Corus Group and Birch Lakes Investments. The company operates facilities in Stockton and Fontana and carries an extensive inventory of beams and other structural products supplying building and construction industries.

“We are pleased to acquire Regal Steel, as the company closely aligns with our market focus and business units in California,” says Michael Hoffman, president and CEO of Macsteel Service Centers USA. “Regal enjoys an excellent reputation with its customers and suppliers. We look forward to adding them and their innovative staff to our network and, as a result, further expand Macsteel’s participation in the structural products market.”

Macsteel’s most recent previous acquisition was Baldwin Steel Co. last September.

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Metals USA Picks Goncalves as President and CEO
Metals USA Inc., Houston, has hired C. Lourenco Goncalves—most recently president and CEO of California Steel Industries Inc.—as its president and chief executive officer. He also fills the seventh and final seat on the board.

Goncalves was with CSI since 1998, before which he held several management posts at Companhia Siderurgica Nacional, Brazil.

Daniel W. Dienst, Metals USA board chairman, says the company anticipates benefiting from Goncalves’ “broad experience in the steel industry. His excellent track record at California Steel Industries speaks for itself. We are confident that Lourenco’s arrival will further energize our company, which has been gaining momentum since our new beginning last November.”

Goncalves says that the same opportunities he found five years ago at California Steel are present at Metals USA. “With the right attitude, and a clear focus on safety and profitability understood and shared by all members of the Metals USA team, I have no doubt we can accomplish the same high level of performance seen at CSI.

”Meanwhile, California Steel Industries Inc. appointed Vicente Wright as interim president and CEO, until its board elects a new leader. Wright had served as CSI’s executive vice president of finance and chief financial officer.

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MSC’s Quiet Steel Debuts on Cadillac
The 2003 Cadillac CTS sports sedan is the first unibody production vehicle to feature an acoustically integrated application of Quiet Steel, an engineered metal-laminate designed to significantly reduce vehicle noise and vibration levels without the use of add-on sound deadening materials.

Developed by MSC’s Engineered Materials and Solutions Group, Quiet Steel consists of an engineered viscoelastic layer sandwiched between two cold-rolled layers of steel. The viscoelastic layer is a “tunable” formulation, allowing vehicle designers to attenuate specific frequencies depending on where in the vehicle they use Quiet Steel.

The laminate may be further engineered with corrosion resistance or other value-added processing. When this initial processing is complete, OEMs can form, stamp and weld Quiet Steel as they would any standard steel.

Quiet Steel was created to provide a significant savings to automotive assembly plants in terms of build-time, costs and vehicle weight. In most cases, it can eliminate add-on sound treatments such as mastics, foams, carpet padding, rubber mats and other costly or labor-intensive measures.

“The automotive market perceives a quiet vehicle as being of intrinsically higher quality, and expects to pay a premium for that luxury,” remarks Mark Gresser, MSC’s director of automotive marketing. “But the weight, cost and manufacturing advantages we’re seeing mean that Quiet Steel can help vehicles across a manufacturer’s entire line achieve luxury levels of noise and vibration reduction.”

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Bankruptcy Filings to Continue in ‘03
PricewaterhouseCoopers, New York, forecasts that public company bankruptcy filings will decline only slightly in 2003 to 180 from 189 in 2002. Total assets of public companies filing for bankruptcy will be $240 billion, down from a peak of $382 billion last year. However, 2003 will represent the third highest total assets at filing in the last 16 years (1987 to 2003).

“The bankruptcy picture for 2003 will represent only a slight improvement, rather than the beginning of a return to average historical levels,” says Carter Pate, U.S. managing partner of revenue and business development at the accounting and consulting firm.

To develop these forecasts, PricewaterhouseCoopers created an econometric model designed to quantify the relationship between observed business conditions and the incidence of bankruptcy filings. The company focused on five factors that influence the level of bankruptcy filings: degree of corporate leverage, cost of borrowing, prevalence of excess production capacity, change in high-yield debt issuance and aggregate economic activity.

PricewaterhouseCoopers determined that in 2003, companies most likely to declare bankruptcy will be concentrated in the following industries: industrial metals and mining (primarily steel and aluminum); energy (mainly in utilities and oil and gas sectors); telecommunications (primarily wirelines and wireless carriers); machinery and equipment (primarily semiconductor and communications device manufacturing); business services (mainly computer software and management consulting); and airlines and aerospace.

“An inside look at these industries reveals structural changes in sectors such as steel, and energy trading and marketing,” Pate says. “Others, like high technology, are recovering from cyclical slumps, but face much slower growth trajectories compared to the pace in the 1990s, while others such as the airline and aerospace industries are being forced to undergo changes due to severe contraction in demand amid much higher operating costs.”

In terms of volume, the five industries with the highest number of bankruptcy filings last year were communications (30 filings), business services (28), electrical and electronic equipment (12), primary metal industries and industrial machinery and equipment (tied at 8 filings each).

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AvestaPolarit Invests in New Service Centers
AvestaPolarit Distribution, the U.K. sales and service center unit of stainless steel producer AvestaPolarit, says it will spend more than $15 million to purchase new equipment, including a cut-to-length and slitting line, for its U.K. service center. The unit will also relocate from Oldbury to refurbished and modernized facilities at AvestaPolarit’s main British plant in Sheffield.

The new equipment should be commissioned by early next year and reach full capacity by mid-summer 2004.

Kari Saarinen, executive vice president of group marketing and technology, says the United Kingdom is a very important market for the company. “If we locate the sales company adjacent to its major supplying mill, we can then ensure that we give customers here the best possible service.”

The unit’s hot-rolled plate service center is unaffected by the move and will continue to operate from Blackburn.

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Southern Aluminum Finishing Opens Fabrication Division
Southern Aluminum Finishing Co. has opened a full-service metal fabrication division and expanded its product line following its Feb. 14 asset purchase of a Winston, Ga., metal fabrication company.

SAF Metal Fabrication, based at the newly purchased 78,000-square-foot Winston facility, significantly expands SAF’s architectural product line, SAF President John B. McClatchey says.

“Our new product offerings include column covers, exterior panel systems, screens and grilles, as well as coping and trim,” he notes.

SAF Vice President Penn M. McClatchey will manage the new division.

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Briefs
New Orleans-based Metal Sales/C.E.M. Products, formed in 2001, has opened two new facilities recently, in Norfolk, Va., to supply East Coast shipyards; and in Bath, Maine, to support a supply contract with Bath Iron Works. Bath Iron Works is building four DDG-51 Class destroyers for the U.S. Navy.

Edgen Corp., Baton Rouge, La., has formed a Carbon Products Group, which consists of the managerial integration of the company’s four carbon pipe and piping components divisions: Bartow Steel, Resource Pipe Co., Service Industrial Supply Co. and Thomas Pipe. Craig Kiefer was tapped to lead the group as president. He is a 30-year veteran of the distribution business, 24 of them with Service Industrial Supply, which he co-founded in 1979 and served as its president. The newly formed group provides a national and international client base with pipe and piping components, as well as services, for a wide range of industry applications.

Concord Steel’s service center in Chicago Heights, Ill., has installed the largest leveler ever built by Cauffiel Machinery Corp. Concord specializes in steel plate and products fabricated from steel plate. The machine has leveling capacity from 1/2 to 7 inches thick at a maximum width of 125 inches. The leveler can also make plate from heavy coils as a cut-to-length line. The new leveler is meant to give Concord Steel the ability to do toll processing by leveling to one-half mill tolerance, at the same time removing cross bow or twists from the plate.

Coastal Pipe Co., a Houston-based drill pipe distribution company, has reached a long-term agreement with Baosteel America to market Baoshan drill pipe in the United States. Baoshan produces seamless drill pipe for use in the oil and gas drilling industry at its Shanghai, China, facility.

Steel Warehouse of Wisconsin Inc., a distributor and processor of carbon steel flat-rolled products, has ordered a 72-inch by 0.25-inch cut-to-length line, and a 72-inch by 0.25-inch slitting line from Braner USA. Both lines are slated to be installed at the Milwaukee plant by mid-year.

Amerimax Building Products Inc.—a supplier of aluminum coil coating and processing, custom fabricated aluminum and steel for the metal service center and coil coating industries—has launched a revamped Web site (www.amerimaxbp.com) that details the company’s products and manufacturing capabilities. Visitors can download brochures, obtain free passes to tradeshows in which Amerimax participates and locate industry information quickly and easily.

Magic Steel, Grand Rapids, Mich., has contracted Morris Material Handling to deliver two 25-ton and two 35-ton P&H cranes for its new steel coil processing facility under construction in Butler, Ind.

Steel Technologies Inc., Louisville, Ky., has contracted Morris Material Handling to supply three new P&H cranes this year for its steel stamping plant in Eminance, Ky. The 15-ton, 20-ton and 25-ton cranes will be used for die and coil handling and maintenance.

Specialty Strip & Oscillating Inc., Masury, Ohio, demonstrated its capabilities during the Metalform ‘03 trade show in March in Rosemont, Ill. The company featured an oscillated coil with 21 miles of continuous strip at the convention.

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