AN Indonesian steel company looks set to buy the Ravenscraig works
with a view to shipping the steel-making equipment to the Far East and
building a slab plant, probably in Malaysia.
A team of experts from PT Gunawan Dianjaya, a family-run group with
experience of similar re-assembly operations, visited the defunct plant
recently and their report is now under study at the company's
headquarters in Surabaya, an industrial port in eastern Indonesia.
Asked about Ravenscraig, a spokesman for the company said that plans
for the project were at an advanced stage and confirmed that a purchase
was ''quite likely''.
But he could offer no financial details or say if the company was also
interested in equipment from the deep-water port at Hunterston.
''We expect to have all the negotiations finalised by April or May
though, as we are still awaiting the final results of the technical
survey, an estimate on the price is still impossible,'' Mr Duon Pak told
The Herald.
Mr Pak, a Korean who is in charge of the Ravenscraig scheme, said
Malaysia would be the most likely destination of the equipment if the
deal were to go through though he hinted that there were other options.
Gunawan, which runs a steel plant in Surayabaya, last year installed
an 800,000-tonne capacity plate mill nearby using equipment bought from
Germany's Dillinger.
British Steel confirmed that Gunawan had emerged as the most likely
buyers from a number of interested parties and agreed that a decision
was due within a few months.
''We are in serious discussions with this company about the sale of
Ravenscraig though that is all we can say at the moment,'' the spokesman
said. If the deal goes through, the plant would probably be assembled at
a coastal site in Northeast Malaysia, where the Indonesian company has
already signed a land lease with the authorities.
A plant with a capacity of around one million tonnes a year could
quickly be assembled and the steel, produced cheaply using local labour,
would be sold mainly to the emerging economies of the Far East.
Some could eventually make its way back to Britain from the re-sited
plant though industry specialists said high transport costs generally
deter such bulk trade.
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