Change of steelmaking's image

• The competition gets a special touch of endeavour for self-controlling. Anxiety about the cycles leads, for instance, the West-European manufacturers to prefer temporary voluntary limitations of production over allowing price slashing. The motto here is that experience shows that demand recovers much quicker than the prices.
  
• Increasing change-over from deliveries according to existing standards to a much closer linking-up of the supplier with the customer. It is necessary to deliver all the time more and more frequently according to the individual requirements of the customer.
  
• Previously, steel travelled to the foreign customer, now investments in steel are travelling to his proximity and these secure deliveries are on the spot and utilise local economic advantages. One of these methods is to promote alliances, i.e. international enterprises arising at the locations of potential trade outlets, taking advantage of relatively profitable local conditions for production, i.e. comparative advantages, and join them with top techniques, technologies and management by the parent advanced countries.
  
• The renowned producers invest today analogously in proximity to significant foreign customers in joint ventures having the character of service centres. These centres, fitted frequently with top treatment technology, enable, moreover, the development of local steel manufacturers securing effectively their own special finalisation.
  
• The advanced industrial countries abandon production of the most common steel grades and concentrate on better vaporisable assortments from the viewpoint of shape, steel brands and treatment processes.
  
• A large part of steel producers heavily diversify.
  
• The manufacturers of long products, especially in Europe, switch over to the so-called short way of production technologies for competitive reasons, i.e. minimill arrangements of production flow.
  
• Experience has not gone unnoticed, that rationalisation and privatisation in the places of production attenuation may be advantageously joined with sales of technological equipments. It is seen in this moment that liquidated production equipment is sold more promptly than its products. China and India are hungry after it, and mediation of these sales is a profitable business.
  
• Globalisation of steel trade, internationalisation of the steel industry, and the unbalanced distribution of regional steel production and steel demand bring large problems in the form of surplus of production capacities expressed in tens of millions of tons of steelmaking production in some regions. These are evaluated world-wide at 100 mil t by the end of this century.

Challenging market position gives cause for quite new approaches to affecting steel use practically in all regions with steel production. As an example, our neighbour - Germany - may be mentioned. 50 % of steel brands produced there are not older than five years.

Progress in the industrial character of the steel industry may be shown in a popular manner on the Eiffel Tower, which has been built a hundred years ago from 7000 tons of steel. At today’s steel qualities, 2000 tons would be sufficient for this structure and if we combine it with the approximately thirty-times increase of labour productivity achieved during these hundred years, then Paris would need to erect today 100 such towers for employment stabilisation.

The present effort to further increase steel attractiveness may be shown in a common project of passenger car body development (ULSAB - ultra-light steel auto body) where already 35 steel companies of 5 continents and from 16 countries (among others also Východoslovenské zelezárny, a.s.) cooperate in order to reduce the body weight by 20 to 25 %. The results achieved until now confirm the reality of this target.