The Marcegaglia Group has been selected by the Chamber of Commerce of the Strasbourg Court as the buyer of the Ascometal site in Fos-sur-Mer. The site is currently under receivership and will be renamed "Marcegaglia Fos-sur-Mer".
All employees will be retained by the Group and it has committed to investing in a major new industrial restructuring project of around €600 million (capex), to which will be added working capital requirements.
Increased EAF production
This project will lead to a significant increase in electric furnace production to between 1 and 1.2 million tonnes of steel, to which will be added a continuous slab caster (replacing the current ingot caster) and a state-of-the-art hot rolling mill, bringing the total production capacity to between 1.6 and 2 million tonnes. Once the transformation is complete, the Fos-sur-Mer site will cover around 30 percent of the Marcegaglia Group's steel needs and will use efficient and sustainable production methods.
"This important acquisition is part of the Group's global strategy aimed at integrating the entire value chain into our production. In addition, the Grand Port in Marseille is strategically located in terms of raw materials and logistics. The major industrial transformation project and the innovative technologies that will be used there will make the Fos-sur-Mer site one of our Group's most important assets.
This investment is part of the overall strategy to develop and decarbonize the Group's activities: steel produced from scrap and "Green DRI" will be able to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent compared to conventional production," say Antonio and Emma Marcegaglia.
