SteelAsia Manufacturing Corp., the country’s leading steel company and the largest manufacturer of steel bars (rebar) in Southeast Asia, signed a $250-million long-term supply deal in Russia with Evraz, one of the top steel producers in the world.
The agreement pertains to a guaranteed monthly supply of 50,000 tons of semi-finished steel, also known as billets, for SteelAsia’s rolling mills in Davao City and Meycauayan, Bulacan. Billets are the input material for many long steel products, including rebars, SteelAsia said.
“We have found that Russian companies are very reliable business partners,” said SteelAsia’s chair and CEO Benjamin O. Yao in a statement.
The Philippine company joined President Duterte during his official visit to Russia this week, accounting for a part of the private sector deals made during the trip that total $875 million.
Apart from Evraz, SteelAsia has also entered into a cooperation arrangement with Kurganstalmost JSC, a Russian firm which produces “metal superstructures,” tapping the latter to provide engineering services as well as training and technology transfer to SteelAsia.
Yao said the long term billet supply contract meant that the company would have a stable supply of raw material, protecting it from any rebar shortage as the company gears up for the government’s massive infrastructure development program.
This is not the first time that SteelAsia partnered with Russian companies.
SteelAsia said it had bought 3.24 million tons of billets worth $1.23 billion from Russia from 1998. In the first quarter of this year, the firm bought 240,000 tons of billets worth $93 million.
The deals developed following the company’s interest to acquire National Steel Corp. last March, which was the largest steel mill in Asia before going bankrupt in 1999.
SteelAsia has an annual capacity of 2.3 million metric tons of steel, the combined output of six plants located across the country.
The company is expanding its rebar capacity to 4 million metric tons in the next five to seven years. —ROY STEPHEN C. CANIVEL