Chairman of Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (MMK) Board of Directors Viktor Rashnikov met the reporters from the world’s leading media such as Reuters», «Nikkei», «Steel Business Briefing», «Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung», «Steel Times International», «Platts», and some other press organs today.

According to MMK PR Deparment, the commentators grew interested in Russia’s leading metallurgical company because of its large-scale upgrades program that brought the enterprise to a new technological height. MMK now manufactures more high value-added produce than any other Russian metallurgical enterprise.

MMK has been competing successfully with the world’s leading steelmakers on the global market for years, with its produce enjoying demand in sixty different countries.

The foreign reporters were taken on a tour of the premises where they could see MMK’s grandest projects – the operating Mill 5000 that manufactures heavy plates for the pipe-making industry and the cold-roll facility currently under construction that will soon be used for making high quality rolled products for the automakers as well as household appliances manufacturers and the building industry.

Besides, the press representatives visited the company’s coating department that focuses on making deep level processing goods which have the highest value-added. Over the last few years, the coating department was fitted with several highly productive modern units that manufacture metal goods using the most advanced technologies.

In the course of their meeting with Viktor Rashnikov, the reporters asked questions about the company’s plans to build up on output, its investment strategies, and further upgrade projects.
The media representatives reflect on the tour of the premises like this:

‘MMK is a giant industrial facility that impresses with its mere size. We have got some metallurgical companies in Japan, too, but they are typically smaller,’ says Natzuki Kaneko of Nikkei.

‘The company is well known all over the world as a large metallurgical enterprise compacted into a single site. MMK is a very important metal goods supplier in the Middle East and also delivers its produce to Europe. This matters much for my company which provides information support and services for the leading producers. I could see here that MMK cooperates with all the major metallurgical equipment makers such as SMS Siemag and Danieli. Given that all the machinery was launched as recently as only two to three years ago, I believe it is quite up-to-date,’ says the editor-in-chief of the online resource Platts Hector Forster.

‘Metallurgical industry is significant to Russia, but, as we all know, this country is a very large metallurgical goods manufacturer. What I was interested in was to see how Russian companies, MMK in particular, are coping in the aftermath of the recession. Your industrial capacity is impressive – the total length of your railways alone is comparable with that of entire Switzerland. It’s hard to compare MMK with anything, since Swiss and German companies are much tinier. MMK keeps upgrading its machinery, and I feel that, even if you did fall behind at some point, now you are making up for it,’ says Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reporter Herald Hosp.