Marcegaglia takes over Fos sur Mer: 600 million plan for revitalisation

The Marcegaglia Group continues along the path of internationalisation and verticalisation that in recent years has led the Mantua-based transformer to become a fully integrated European steel player. Now the company, led by Antonio and Emma Marcegaglia, is preparing to put on the ground a 600 million euro investment plan to relaunch Fos sur Mer, the former Ascometal steel plant (owned by Swiss Steel), currently in receivership. The green light for the acquisition and the restart plan came yesterday, with the ruling issued by the Commercial Chamber of the Strasbourg Judicial Court, which officially selected the Marcegaglia Group as the buyer of the site, which will take the name Marcegaglia Fos sur Mer.

The group has committed to hire all employees (around 300 are currently working) and to invest around €600 million in a new industrial transformation project, plus working capital requirements. One of the underlying rationale of the investment is the possibility of integrating French production capacity into the Marcegaglia Group's orbit, which will help meet a considerable part of Italy's domestic needs.

This project - according to the Mantua-based group itself - will result in a significant increase in the production of the electric furnace to 1-1.2 million tonnes of steel, to which will be added a continuous casting plant for slabs (instead of the current ingots) and a state-of-the-art hot coil rolling plant, for a total production capacity of between 1.6 and 2 million tonnes. At the end of the transformation, the Fos sur Mer site will meet about 30% of the Marcegaglia Group's steel requirements and will use efficient and sustainable production methods.

Fos sur Mer is just one piece in the dossier of Ascometal, a historic French giant that has gone through several bankruptcies and numerous ownerships (from 1999 to 2012 it was also owned by the Lucchini Group). Acciaierie Venete is still in the running in this regard: after failing to reach an agreement with Swiss Steel, the group led by Alessandro Banzato has formulated a new proposal within the framework of the receivership procedure, aiming to take over the three factories of Hagondange, Custines and Le Marais, i.e. Ascometal's former automotive pole specialising in the production of special steels, together with the group's research centre. The Strasbourg Court, in this case, is expected to rule by the end of June.

'This important acquisition is part of the Group's global strategy to integrate the entire value chain into our production,' explained Antonio and Emma Marcegaglia. 'Moreover, the Grand Port in Marseille is strategically located in terms of raw materials and logistics. The significant industrial transformation project and the innovative technologies used will make the Fos sur Mer site one of our Group's most important assets. This investment is part of a broader strategy of development and decarbonisation of the Group's activities: steel produced from scrap and green Dri will, in fact, be able to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80% compared to full-cycle production.