Company News Apr 26, 2007 11:02 AM
Investment offensive at ThyssenKrupp Electrical Steel
By upgrading its decarburizing line, ThyssenKrupp Electrical Steel GmbH has increased its annual production capacity for grain-oriented electrical steel to 260,000 metric tons. The company is using the additional capacity to expand its range of higher value-added products. In the medium-term, the company aims to increase the share of premium grades in total production to over 50 percent.
ThyssenKrupp Electrical Steel is currently the world’s third-largest manufacturer of grain-oriented electrical steel, a material offering special electromagnetic properties which are achieved in a complex production process. It is mainly used for transformer cores. Depending on size, modern high-performance transformers contain 50 to 350 tons of grain-oriented electrical steel.
ThyssenKrupp Electrical Steel employs around 1,100 people at its main plant in Gelsenkirchen and at Isbergues in northern France. In fiscal 2004/2005, the capacity of the two plants was 200,000 tons per year. Since then, €84 million has been invested in expanding the production facilities.
The new equipment taken into service to upgrade an existing decarburizing line is a core element of this strategy. It offers enhanced possibilities for producing premium grades, which take longer to decarburize than standard products. Using ThyssenKrupp Electrical Steel’s PowerCore H product line, transformers achieve efficiency levels of up to 99 percent.
ThyssenKrupp Electrical Steel is currently operating in a booming market. The boom is being driven above all by infrastructure measures in China, India and other emerging countries. “However,” says Clemens Iller, Executive Board Chairman of ThyssenKrupp Electrical Steel, “we must not close our eyes to the fact that additional electrical steel capacities are being built throughout the world. That’s why we are focusing firmly on higher value-added products. We aim to play a market-leading role both in terms of quantity and quality in the future.”
This press release is also available on the internet at: www.thyssenkrupp-steel.de