The European antitrust authority has given the green light to long steel producer Feralpi buying a 50% stake in Caleotto, a special wire rod re-roller producer based in Lecco, Italy, from Duferco Italia Holding.
Feralpi, which will own 100% of Caleotto, said Giovanni Pasini, executive director of Feralpi, was also President of Caleotto.
“Despite the delicate economic phase that we are living due to the global pandemic and a rather weak steel market, we full support the follow up on Caleotto’s multi-year development plan,” Giovanni Pasini said.
Pasini also said that the collaboration between Feralpi and Duferco will continue in order to expand the range of high quality steel.
“The Feralpi-Duferco synergy has in fact relaunched the plant from both a technical and commercial basis. In this period the priority is the health of our workers, but immediately afterwards there is the need to start again as soon as the condition will allow us,” he said.
At the moment, the Italian market was “frozen” as mills and re-rollers are not working, all production has been suspended with exception of the two largest Italian flat steel producers, AM Italia in Taranto and Arvedi, that never the less are working at their lower historical rate.
Feralpi, that has also companies outside Italy and that in total produces around over 2 million mt of steel a year, in Italy where it has its headquarter, is based in Lombardy as well as Caleotto. Lombardy is the heart of the Italian manufacturing production but also the worst hit region so far by the coronavirus. Half of the Italian 23 million steel production is produced in Lombardy.
Caleotto has a design capacity of 250,000 mt/year, and the plans are to expend productions and qualities. Caleotto produces rod for the automotive sectors. According to S&P Global Platts data, the Italian wire rod market is about 3.5 million mt/year, is second in size in Europe only to the German market. The target market for the product type of Caleotto is between 1.5 million mt and 1.8 million mt.
— Annalisa Villa
