British Stainless Steel Association hosts Outokumpu.

Juha Rantanen, Outokumpu's new CEO, appointed at the close of 2004, was guest speaker at this year's British Stainless Steel Association lunch held in Sheffield on 13th April.

This closely followed his address to the Annual Meeting of Outokumpu

in Helsinki, on 8th April in which he confirmed Outokumpu's near 100% commitment to stainless steel having shed the last of its historical copper origins when it divested its fabricated copper products business to Nordic Capital in early April. The company, which was established to mine a copper deposit located near the town of Outokumpu in Finland at the turn of the 20th century and later expanded into zinc mining, decided some two years ago that it was not a sufficiently large player in the mining field and hence exited this to concentrate on becoming one of the world's largest producers of stainless steel. The reason for this, said Mr Rantanen, was stainless' attractive growth prospects with output growing 6-7%t annually.

The company has retained its technology division, which reported sales of 423M [euro] in 2004 and made an operating profit of 29M [euro] (or comparable profit of 8.0M [euro]). This contrasts with sales of 4637M [euro] and comparable profit of 425M [euro] for the Stainless Division. The technology division benefits from the sale of former Lurgi technologies following the acquisition of Lurgi's metallurgical plant interests in exchange for Outokumpu's mining equipment interests.

Outokumpu has stainless production facilities in Sheffield, England, Avesta, Sweden and Tornio, Finland. Tornio is very much the largest plant and is located close to chromite deposits at Kemi, mined by Outokumpu, the company's only remaining interest in ore extraction. Output there in 2004 was 1.2Mt ore converted to 580kt of concentrate. This is smelted to ferrochrome at Tornio where it is fed as hot metal to the AODs to provide the chromium alloying requirement for production of stainless steel. The hot metal feed significantly reduces energy requirements and therefore costs.

Much investment has gone into Tornio to increase capacity to 1.65Mt/y of metal production of which 750kt/y will be finished as cold rolled product making it the world's largest dedicated stainless producers (see STI June 04 p56). In March, a new production record was set at the new cold rolling mill (RAP5).