SMM6, 20 March: (United States Steel Corp), a US steel company, said on Tuesday that it would shut down two blast furnaces in the United States and a blast furnace in Europe.
The main reason is that US steelmakers have returned to their original capacity after US President Donald Trump (Donald Trump) imposed tariffs on imports of steel from countries, including China, but the general environment is that manufacturing demand has weakened and prices have been suppressed, so the recovery of capacity has led to an oversupply of steel.
The first blast furnace to be closed in the United States is in Gary Works, Indiana. The Gary plant has four blast furnaces and an annual capacity of 7.5 million tons of crude steel.
The second blast furnace, located in Great Lakes Works, Ecorse and River Rouge, Michigan, has three blast furnaces with an annual capacity of 3.8 million tons of crude steel.
If the blast furnaces are not shut down but left idle, the idle blast furnaces will reduce the company's monthly production capacity by 20-225000 tons, or 240-2.7 million tons per year, starting in July. That's why the company made this decision.
At the same time, in Europe, increasing imports and higher raw material costs are hurting the company's profits, so one of the company's blast furnaces in Europe will also be shut down.
U. S. steel companies in the second quarter of this year's profit performance is also not satisfactory.
The company expects adjusted profit before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization of about $250 million in the second quarter, down from the first quarter and below analysts' expectations of $291 million, compared with $1.1 billion in 2018.
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