Intermet Expects to Close Plants in Wisconsin

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Researched by Industrialinfo.com (Industrial Information Resources, Incorporated; Houston, Texas). Intermet Corporation (OTC:INMTQ.PK) (Troy, Michigan) is planning to close its plants in Sturtevant, Wisconsin, in June 2005. The company will be closing its machining and die casting plants because of a shortage of iron and steel scrap raw material and increased foreign competition. The cost of scrap steel increased from an average of approximately $160 per ton at the beginning of 2003 to approximately $395 per ton at the end of August 2004. In addition, the decision also hinged upon significant underutilization of current casting and machining capacities at those locations, all of which led to filing for Chapter 11 reorganization in 2004. The company is in the process of relocating some of the equipment to other plants and selling off the rest. The closure of the plants will affect over 1,000 employees.

Intermet Corporation is a manufacturer of powertrain, chassis, suspension, and structural components for the automotive industry. The European office of Intermet is located in Saarbruecken, Germany, and its operations are in Germany and Portugal. Before the reorganization, the company had a total of seventeen manufacturing plants, with an annual capacity of 700,000 tons. Intermet employed 5,400 people worldwide, 4,200 of them in the United States.

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