Russia's Industrial Metallurgical Holding (IMH) company began producing steel rebar at its new Tula-Steel subsidiary facility last week.
Despite worries in the market, the steelmaking asset's start-up has had no impact on the pig iron shipments from Tulachermet, Russia's largest merchant pig iron producer, run by IMH. "Last week we started shipments of rebar to the domestic market [in Russia]," a source from IMH told Metal Bulletin. "For the moment we haven't started the BOF [basic oxygen furnace], we re-roll merchant billets." IMH buys its billet from one supplier in the Russian domestic market, the above source said. The first batch...