ThyssenKrupp AG history, profile and corporate video
ThyssenKrupp AG engages in the production of steel. It operates through the following business areas: Components Technology, Industrial Solutions, Elevator Technology, Materials Services, Steel Europe, and Steel Americas. The Components Technology business develops and manufactures slewing bearings, crawler and crawler components, steering shafts, steering columns, and steering gears. The Elevator Technology business range includes passenger and freight elevators, escalators, moving walks, passenger boarding bridges as well as stair and platform lifts. The Industrial Solutions business provides engineering services for the design and construction of chemical plants, refineries and other industrial facilities, equipment for the cement and minerals industries, machinery and systems for the mining, processing, handling and transportation of raw materials and minerals, as well as car body and final assembly equipment including related control and test systems for automotive manufacturers and suppliers. The Materials Services business focused on the distribution of materials and the provision of complex technical services for the production and manufacturing sectors. The Steel Europe business is focused on market for premium flat carbon steel. The Steel Americas business will focus on the production, processing and marketing of carbon steels. The company was founded on March 17, 1999 and is headquartered in Essen, Germany.“
“ThyssenKrupp Group History
ThyssenKrupp is the result of a merger of two German steel companies, Thyssen AG founded in 1891 and Krupp founded in 1811. As early as the 1980s, the companies began negotiations on a merger and began closely cooperating in some business areas. In 1997, the companies combined their flat steel activities, with a full merger completed in March 1999.
Mergers and acquisitions
During a period of expansion in 1978 Thyssen AG entered the North American automotive industry with the acquisition of Budd’s automotive operations, which became the automotive division of Thyssen and operated in North America as Budd Thyssen, later ThyssenKrupp Budd Co. In October 2006 ThyssenKrupp sold ThyssenKrupp Budd’s North American body and chassis operations to Martinrea International Inc.
In 1999 Thyssen (one of the companies of the merger to form ThyssenKrupp Elevator) acquired the American based Dover Elevator Company. Four years later ThyssenKrupp acquired the Korean based Dongyang Elevator.
In 2005 ThyssenKrupp acquired Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft (HDW) in Kiel from One Equity Partners. ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems (TKMS) is now the most important European group of shipbuilders. In addition to HDW Blohm + Voss in Hamburg, as well as Nordseewerke at Emden, also are subsidiaries of TKMS. One Equity Partners holds 25% of the TKMS shares.
In December 2005 ThyssenKrupp acquired 60% of Atlas Elektronik from BAE Systems with EADS acquiring the remaining 40%.
In August 2007 ThyssenKrupp Materials North America acquired OnlineMetals.com, a small-quantity distributor of semi-finished metals and plastics based in Seattle, WA.
In early 2008 ThyssenKrupp Aerospace acquired Apollo Metals and Aviation Metals, both suppliers to aerospace and defence based inKent, Washington.
In April 2014, ThyssenKrupp announced it was in talks to sell its Swedish maritime defence unit to Saab after failing to agree deals with theSwedish government for a new generation of submarines.
US subsidiaries
On 11 May 2007, ThyssenKrupp AG announced an investment of €3.1 billion (US$4.19 billion) for a project consisting of building new carbon steel and stainless steel processing facilities in southern Alabama that would employ 2,700 people when fully operational. The project, along with a multi-billion dollar greenfield steelmaking facility in Brazil, is a cornerstone of ThyssenKrupp’s new global expansion strategy into the North American and NAFTA high-value carbon steel markets. The company announced that the investment was increased to $4.6 billion in 2010. As of the date of the announcement, the investment was the largest private economic development investment in Alabama’s history and the largest by a German company in the U.S. The site selection announcement came after several months of competition involving several southeastern sites which was eventually narrowed between a site on the Mississippi River in Convent, Louisiana, and a site on the Tombigbee River, in Calvert, Alabama in north Mobile County, about 40 miles north of Mobile. The site in Alabama was eventually chosen. Groundbreaking on the Calvert facilities was held in November 2007. The carbon steel and stainless steel companies are independent and operate under different management teams. Co-locating both facilities on the same site enabled the company to optimize the investment in infrastructure and in some shared processing.
The carbon steel company, ThyssenKrupp Steel USA, which represented seventy percent of the overall project investment and hiring, consists of a state-of-the-art hot strip mill, cold rolling mill, and four hot dip galvanizing lines. The hot strip mill began operations in July 2010, the cold roll mill in September 2010, and the first of the hot dip galvanizing lines in March 2011. The company projects to be fully operational in late 2011 and employ approximately 1,800 people at that time. ThyssenKrupp Stainless USA projects to employ approximately 900 people when fully operational in late 2012. At full production, ThyssenKrupp Steel USA will have the capacity to produce 4 million metric tons of carbon steel for NAFTA customers in the automotive, construction, appliance, pipe and tube, and service center industries. In July 2011, the carbon steel project was awarded “Best Greenfield Technology” by American Metal Market, considered to be the longest continuously published newspaper in the metals industry.
ThyssenKrupp Stainless USA has built a cold roll mill and is in the process of building a meltshop. The company projects it will employ approximately 900 people when fully operational in late 2012. In January 2009, ThyssenKrupp announced that in response to the weakened North American stainless steel market and the deteriorating global economy, the production startup date for the cold rolling line for ThyssenKrupp Stainless USA would be delayed at least one year while its meltshop would be further delayed until the last quarter of 2011. On December 10, 2010 ThyssenKrupp announced approval for start of construction for the meltshop with an expected completion date of December 2012.
Additionally, the Alabama State Port Authority invested over $100 million to build a state-of-the-art transloading slab terminal on the southern tip of Pinto Island in Mobile Bay to service the inbound raw material slabs for the upriver carbon steel facility. Raw material slabs shipped to the Alabama facility from ThyssenKrupp CSA are transloaded from panamax ships at the terminal onto shallow draft barges for transport upriver to the facility. The terminal is equipped with three wide-span gantry cranes with state-of-the-art magnetic lifting gear designed by ThyssenKrupp and utilizes RFID technology to read identifiers on each slab and provide up-to-date inventory records that provide each slab’s location and weight. The same magnetic technology is also used at ThyssenKrupp’s Calvert facility. The terminal was necessary to Alabama’s award of the project since the Tombigbee River depth and lack of turning basins prohibit deep draft ship navigation to the site in Calvert.
The world steel industry peaked in 2007. just as the company spent $12 billion to build the two most modern mills in the world, in Alabama and Brazil. The worldwide great recession starting in 2008, however, with its heavy cutbacks in construction, sharply lowered demand and prices fell 40%. ThyssenKrupp lost $11 billion on its two new plants, which sold steel below the cost of production. ThyssenKrupp’s stainless steel division, Inoxum, including the stainless portion of the US plant, was sold to Finnish stainless steel company Outokumpu in 2012. Finally in 2013, ThyssenKrupp offered the remaining portion of the plant for sale at under $4 billion.
On February 26, 2014, ThyssenKrupp sold their Calvert carbon steel facility to ArcelorMittal and Nippon Steel for $1.55 billion.
Sale of Tailored Blanks
In September 2012 ThyssenKrupp agreed to sell the automotive components manufacturer Tailored Blanks to the China-based Wuhan Iron and Steel for an undisclosed price.At the time of the agreement Tailored Blanks had annual sales of around 700 million euros and a global market share of about 40 percent in automotive laser-welded blanks.”
*Information from Forbes.com and Wikipedia.org
**Video published on YouTube by “thyssenkrupp“