Russia’s Severstal invests $2.8 mil in steel service center to boost processing

Russian mining and steel company Severstal is investing Rb200 million ($2.8 million) this year in new processing equipment of its Kolpino steel service center in northwest Russia’s Leningrad region.

The modernization will expand the center’s capabilities, increase its productivity and help it move from blank production to sub-assembly at some point in the future.

The center is to get a laser cutting machine designed to cut 1mm-20mm thick sheets and plate. Together with the facility’s existing equipment, this will enable Kolpino to process the entire 1mm-40mm range of flat rolled steel thicknesses.

It will also get a gas-plasma cutting machine, which will ensure higher precision of cutting.

A third piece of new equipment, a coordinate drilling machine, will provide high accuracy in hole marking and drilling.

The edge milling machine will finish plate or blank edges to high precision, and the last unit of the new equipment — a straightening machine — will ensure up to 0.2 mm/meter flatness in steel-made parts and blanks.

As a result of the investment, the company said that the Kolpino center will significantly improve its metal processing capabilities, offering customers new products and delivering larger output quantities, which will help it reduce operational costs and increase profitability.

— Ekaterina Bouckley