TPT September 2012

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Global Marketplace
September 2012 105
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infrastructure, especially delays in construction of a 186-mile
rail link to serve the planned Acu works.
› Other Brazilian news – from Nomura International, the
London-based subsidiary of the Japanese financial
services group – concerned the German steelmaker
ThyssenKrupp AG’s proposed sale of its stake in the
Companhia Siderurgica do Atlantico (CSA) works, also in
Rio de Janeiro state. Nomura said the sale could provide
potential investors with “an attractive alternative to greenfield
investment in a Brazilian steel mill, given the likely [capital
expenditure] overruns and delays typically associated with
building out capacity in Brazil.”
The Nomura research report (4 July) continued, “The
confirmation that Wuhan continues to consider investment
in Brazil keeps us comfortable that a sale of CSA will be
possible in the next 12 months.”
› As reported from New Delhi in the Wall Street Journal
(3 July), the Steel Authority of India Ltd and Japan’s
Kobe Steel Ltd were to sign a joint-venture agreement
within the week to set up an iron processing plant in India
with a capacity of 500,000 metric tons of nuggets per year.
The information was attributed to Indian steel secretary
DRS Chaudhary, who said the 50-50 partnership would
make a total investment of $272mn in the plant, to be set
up in the eastern town of Durgapur. The two companies in
2010 entered into an initial agreement to make nuggets
using Kobe technology.
Elsewhere in metals . . .
› A growing environmental movement in China has begun to
make polluting projects harder to build. On 3 July, strong
protests against the planned construction of one of the largest
copper and molybdenum smelting complexes anywhere
prompted local officials in southwestern China’s Sichuan
Province to backpedal. The local government of Shifang,
the planned site of the smelter, announced in a statement
that construction of the $1.6bn complex had not merely been
suspended: it was halted permanently.
The smelter had been intended as the centrepiece of the
economic revitalisation of an area devastated by the 2008
Sichuan earthquake, but a crowd estimated by local residents
at several thousand strong demonstrated its opposition.
As noted by Time (4 July), the earthquake destroyed two
chemical plants in Shifang, forcing 6,000 people to evacuate
when 80 tons of ammonia leaked. Fears linger about the
susceptibility of industry to damage and the possibility of
more such dangerous leaks after a natural disaster.
Sichuan Hongda Chemical Industry Co, China’s third-largest
zinc producer, was to have erected the smelter. On news of
the cancellation the company’s shares slumped 9.2 per cent,
its biggest drop since November 2010.
Dorothy Fabian, Features Editor (USA)