Nippon Steel in New Tinplate Joint Venture

May. 3 -- Japan’s Nippon Steel has announced a new joint venture in China which will boost its global tinplate production capacity to two million tonnes a year. The new 50:50 joint venture with Wuhan Iron and Steel is a 24 billion yen (US$293 million) plant in Hubei Province with an annual capacity of 200,000 tpy. It is expected to come online in summer 2013. The project also includes a 400,000 tpy continuous annealing line.

Nippon Steel already has one tinplate venture in China’s Guangdong province as well as others in Thailand and Indonesia. With the new factory, the group’s overseas tinplate output capacity will increase by a third to 800,000 tpy. The production capacity of its three Japanese plants is up to 1.2 million tpy.

The Japanese company forecasts that China’s demand for tinplate will increase to between 3.28 and 3.70 million tonnes by 2015, compared to 2.32 – 3.0 million tonnes in 2009.