Nippon Steel and Baoshan Iron Steel will build a new plant in Shanghai

The large Japanese industrial corporation Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corp. reported the intention to build an enterprise together with the Chinese partner company Baoshan Iron & Steel. Investments of 1.1 billion yuan ($ 180 million) will be invested in the construction of the plant for the production of automobile sheet steel. This production facility will produce products mainly for the Chinese market, where the growing demand for this type of metal rolling is noted.

Investment activity is the last step in the global expansion of Nippon Steel, which is the second largest manufacturer of metal rolling and steel in the world and seeks to increase its presence in developing markets, for example, such as Chinese, including leading automobile markets.

The plant will be built nearby in the production area of ​​Shanghai. The new facility will be commissioned in 2015. The company will increase the annual volume of the manufactured car leaf steel by 420 thousand tons to 2.62 million tons.

“We expect that the growth of the sale of cars in China will increase, so in the future we want to maintain our share in the market at a level of 50 percent. For this reason, we decided to expand our production line here,” said Nippon Steel CEO Eiti Hosoy.

The share of enterprises for the production of galvanized steel belonging to a joint Japanese-Chinese enterprise is about 50 percent of the total in China. In addition to Chinese consumers, Nippon Steel and Baoshan standing customers are many Japanese automakers.

The direct competitor of Nippon Steel, the Japanese company JFE Steel, which is one of the divisions of the JFE Holdings Inc corporation, in June next year will build a similar object in Indonesia.