Iron and Steel Corporation

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The Iron and Steel Corporation Ltd. , abbreviated ISCOR , was a semi-state industrial company founded in South Africa in 1928 , which for several decades embodied the core of the country's national steel industry . From March 2005, parts of the former state-owned company were taken over by Mittal Steel South Africa Ltd. up and from October 2006 to ArcelorMittal South Africa , part of the Luxembourg- based company ArcelorMittal .

history

prehistory

Before the founding of the South African Union in 1910, goods production in South Africa was relatively severely restricted. Many technical products and equipment had to be imported, mostly from England . The manufacture of technical or mechanical products was limited to the needs of the predominantly agricultural economic structure.

It was not until the discovery of the diamond and gold deposits that the emerging coal and steel industry created a significant increase in the need for technical equipment, as a result of which a rapidly growing railway network was formed. This development promoted the desire to reduce the import dependence of the South African (British) colonial economy on European manufacturers and to create a steel and mechanical engineering industry based on domestic raw materials.

The Witwatersrand Co-operative Smelting Works (founded in 1909), George Holt & Co. Ltd. were among the early companies in this sector . (1910), Cartwright & Eaton Ltd. (1911) and the Union Steel Corporation (1911) in Vereeniging , which mainly dealt with scrap recycling due to the lack of iron mining. Not until 1916 were there any notable efforts to exploit domestic iron ore deposits. First and foremost, it was Pretoria Iron Mines Ltd. (founded 1916) with the participation of Cornelis F. Delfos, also Lewis & Marks in Vereeniging and M. Eaton in Newcastle (Natal), which developed the first industrial mining activities. Between 1920 and 1924 there were efforts to bundle the various interests within this industrial sector and to be able to use the local iron ore deposits more effectively with the creation of a larger private company. These attempts failed after the parliamentary elections of 1924, as a result of which the new government under Prime Minister Barry Hertzog favored industrial development under state leadership.

Foundation and development

ISCOR was founded on the basis of the Iron and Steel Industry Act ( Act No. 11/1928 ) as a stock corporation with the name South African Iron & Steel Corporation . The majority, 51 percent of the share capital was administered by the Governor-General of the Union of South Africa. The minority interests were in private hands. The initial capital was the equivalent of 7 million rand . The management at that time consisted of seven directors, four of whom were appointed by the government and the other three by the shareholders.

The first blast furnace tapping at Pretoria Works took place on April 4, 1934. The war economy that emerged later gave ISCOR a good order book and prepared the basis for further industrial expansion. The Vanderbijlpark Works rolling mill went into operation in 1943 and supplied sheet metal for shipyards and for the construction of armored vehicles for South Africa's war participation. After the end of the war, this rolling mill location was expanded and produced for customers in 1947.

The ISCOR operating facilities were able to operate stably until 1939. A large part of the trained staff were Germans who had come to the South African Union through contractual agreements. When the Smuts government sided with the war allies after the beginning of the Second World War , the German employees were interned. Many employees with little or no training remained in the factories. By contrast, trained South Africans served in the South African armed forces . That put the company to a tough test.

In the 1950s , a second ironworks site began to emerge in Vanderbijlpark , a large industrial township 7 miles west of Vereeniging . With the locations in Pretoria and Vanderbijlpark, ISCOR was able to cover 90 percent of the domestic steel demand. In parallel to ISCOR, the government created another state-owned company, the African Metals Corporation (Amcor), that carried out exploration of deposits and provided various services for steel production.

Another steel mill was built in Newcastle in 1971 .

In November 1989 ISCOR was completely privatized. The company's shares were listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange . In mid-1991 ISCOR bought the steel industry from Union Steel Corporation (USCO), which later became Vereeniging Works .

Together with the Industrial Development Corporation , a project to build the Saldanha Steel Mill was launched in 1996 . The steel and rolling mill on the edge of the Langebaan lagoon (near Saldanha Bay ) was put into operation in 1998 and started production in 1999.

In December 2001 the steel and mining group was restructured. This resulted in two metallurgy companies, ISCOR and Kumba Resources (formerly Iscor Mining Division ). The mining areas that are essential for steel production, such as coal , zinc , mineral sands and other industrial minerals , as well as two iron ore mining operations and mining rights for heavy mineral sands, went to Kumba Resources .

Iron ore mining by ISCOR

ISCOR also owned the Sishen Iron Ore Mine near Sishen , where preparatory ore processing had been carried out using the dry process since 1953 . This is the largest open cast iron ore mine in South Africa. The ore mining here has increased steeply since 1975. In 1961, the processing technology was changed in favor of a wet process. These plants, known as the South Plant , were extensively modernized in 1973. The raw material concentrates were transported by rail to the smelting plant in Vanderbijlpark Works (690 km by rail) and to the Newcastle Works blast furnace site (1000 km by rail) in the province of Natal , the latter being taken over by ISCOR from Samancor.

Another processing facility for the export of iron ore, the North Plant near Kathu , was built in 1973 and went into operation in 1976. There is an extensive occurrence of hematite in a BIF deposit . Later rationalization measures led to the closure of the South Plant in 1984 . The Sishen – Saldanha railway line, which was specially built for this ore export, has since transported the product to the port of Saldanha on the Atlantic coast .

ISCOR operated another major ore mining with the Thabazimbi Iron Ore Mine in the northwest of the then Transvaal Province near Thabazimbi (now in the Limpopo Province). Deposit development began in 1931 and ore production began in 1933. The extraction took place both in opencast and underground mining .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hobart Houghton : The South African Economy . Oxford University Press , Cape Town 1964, pp. 112-116.
  2. ^ A b René A. Pelletier: Mineral Resources of South-Central Africa. Oxford University Press, Cape Town / London / New York / Toronto 1964, pp. 108-109.
  3. ^ Houghton, 1964, p. 116.
  4. ↑ a b c d e ArcelorMittal: Our History . at www.arcelormittalsa.com (English).
  5. ↑ Houghton, 1964, pp. 118-119.
  6. ↑ ArcelorMittal: Saldanha Works Overview ( Memento from August 12, 2018 in the Internet Archive ). at www.arcelormittalsa.com (English).
  7. ^ Exxaro: Company Profile . at www.exxaro.com (English).
  8. ↑ AngloAmericanZA: Operations: mine Sishen . at www.angloamericankumba.com (English).
  9. ↑ DJC Taylor, DC Page & P. Geldenhuys: Iron and steel in South Africa . In: Journal of the South African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, Vol. 88, no. 3 (1988), pp. 73–95, here pp. 79, 81, 91 online at www.saimm.co.za (English, PDF file 2.0 MB).
  10. ^ Mining technology: Sishen Mine, Northern Cape . at www.mining-technology.com (English).
  11. ↑ AngloAmericanZA: Operations: Thabazimbi mine . at www.angloamericankumba.com (English).
  12. ↑ Taylor, Page & Geldenhuys, 1988, pp. 83, 86.