Electricity prices make operations unprofitable, my job is to convince the Group to support and believe in Ukraine – CEO of "ArcelorMittal Kryvyi Rih"

The exclusive interview with Mauro Longobardo, CEO of the Kryvyi Rih Mining and Metallurgical Plant PJSC “ArcelorMittal Kryvyi Rih” (AMKR, Dnipropetrovsk region)

Text: Yuriy Guly

What is the current production load at the plant? How many blast furnaces are operating, how many are idle, and why?

Let’s start from the mining department first and then go to the steel plant. 

The mining department is running around 75% of its full capacity. And, today, it is more than enough to cover everything that we need at our steel plant, all the exports towards the sister companies in Europe, and different exports to China. So, somehow this is the volume that we are after him now – approximately, 7.5 million tons of concentrate per year, that represents 75% of our full capacity. Before the war – around a million tons of monthly production capacity. 

Now, at the steel plant, we are still operating with two blast furnaces. Unfortunately, the first days of this year were very difficult in the sense that we did not always have availability of electricity. I mean, it is not always the problem of the price of it. But, especially in January, we had a lot of blackouts. So, we couldn’t actually operate two blast furnaces in a continuous way. We had some incidents, blackouts, which required us to safely put on idle one of two blast furnaces some days. Now we are back with two, and we hope that we can maintain this production rate along the year. 

Generally, the main problem with blast furnaces was the lack of electricity after specific missile and drone attacks over electricity infrastructure. 

So, you mean that there was a period when you did not operate with blast furnaces at all, fully on idle. Is that correct?

Yes, this is correct. In