Tata Steel, one of the leading steel makers in the world, announced Wednesday that some coil processing facilities including the sibling hot strip mill at Llanwern, Newport, will come out of production but will be retained so they can be restarted in more favourable market conditions.
Stuart Wilkie, director of Strip Products UK, said, "The higher-cost Llanwern mill has ramped up and down on two occasions since 2009. In the past five years, Tata Steel has invested upwards of 350 million pounds to improve the steel industry in Wales."
"The changes we have told employees about will reduce our costs and enable us to focus on generating more value from our products, which will improve our competitiveness. We need to concentrate more on sales of differentiated products to key sectors including automotive, engineering, construction, packaging and consumer goods," he added.
The company said it will concentrate UK production of hot rolled coil at its hot strip mill in Port Talbot which has benefited from quality and capacity upgrades and uses recovered energy sources from the steelworks.
Tata Steel told employees at its South Wales-based strip products business of the need to reduce costs and focus on manufacturing higher-value products.
Shares of the company gained Rs 3.5, or 1.62%, to trade at Rs 219.00. The total volume of shares traded was 899,134 at the BSE (12.36 p.m., Thursday).