While informing in May on our plans regarding the primary operations in Krakow we emphasized that steel industry is faced with many challenges of global, European and local nature.
We currently are facing a slowdown in world trade, which heavily impacts the steel industry in Europe. According to EUROFER, the global overcapacity in the steel industry amounts to 425 m tons.
The currently processed compensations for energy-intensive industries, which ArcelorMittal Poland’s trade union members refer to in their statement, will definitely support our industry but this is a local action. Our sector needs solutions at the European level, especially when it comes to safeguard measures protecting the industry against unfair imports from third countries and those concerning the EU ETS.
It is worth noting that since May the conditions for our sector have further deteriorated, the iron ore price increased by 30 dollars per tonne and on 1st of July EU increased quotas for steel imports by another 5%, which means that they increased by as much as 10% over six months. Recent announcements of other steel plants in Europe (a.o. Slovakia and Poland) are confirming the difficult situation which the EU steel makers are facing today.
We declare that our priority is to find jobs for those employees of our company who will be affected by the temporary idling. That is why we suspended external recruitment processes. We are now finalizing the analysis of available posts, analyzing professional profiles of our employees, and matching the right candidates to specific posts. Once more we wish to underline that the production reduction measures introduced by ArcelorMittal in Poland are of temporary nature. We are hopeful that market conditions will improve as the year progresses, and that an appropriate supply / demand balance as well as the level playing field will be restored.
