Gerdau AmeriSteel Expanding Mills in U.S. and Canada

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Researched by industrialinfo.com (Industrial Information Resources, Incorporated; Houston, Texas). Gerdau AmeriSteel, a new entity created by the recent merger of Gerdau SA's (Porto Alegre, Brazil) (NYSE:GGB) North American holdings and Co-Steel, Incorporated (Whitby, Ontario) (TSX:CEI), is already overhauling its new acquisitions. Co-Steel stockholders formally accepted the merger on September 23.

See related article and including a map of Gerdau's Northamerican mill operations: Gerdau Steel's Acquisition and Growth Mode Continues.

AmeriSteel's holdings include eleven mills in the U.S. and Canada and 29 downstream fabricating and specialty product businesses, and it now has a combined annual steel making capacity of around 7.1 million tons and produces finished steel products for the construction, agricultural, automotive, and industrial sectors of eastern North America.

The Knoxville, Tennessee, mill will be putting out bids very soon for the installation of a new shear, replacing a breaking slide on a cooling bed, and other miscellaneous upgrades. The work will be done during two outages, one during the Christmas holidays and one at the end of February 2003, with projected completion by March 2003.

The Gerdau Courtice mill in Whitby, Ontario will also be undergoing a major facelift in the near future. The mill has ordered a 550,000cfm baghouse from Decos Impiante (Milan, Italy), an environmental engineering technology company, which is a subsidiary of Voest-Alpine Industrieanlagenbau (Linz, Austria). Projected completion of this project is also March 2003.

Gerdau AmeriSteel's mill in Cartersville, Georgia, is also undergoing a major revamp, with a completely new finishing end, cooling bed, brake slide, and a new warehouse. Work is scheduled for the Christmas 2002 mill outage.