US steel tech firm bullish about SE Asia

NEW YORK: A steel technology group in the United States, which has
supplied specialised technology to steel plants in Malaysia in the
past, says it is bullish about Southeast Asia and Asia.



Henry Gaines, Marketing Director of Charlotte, North Carolina-based
Midrex Technologies, was upbeat about Asia and particularly Southeast
Asia, including Malaysia.



"We provided technology for two major plants in Malaysia -– the
oldest Hot Briquetted Iron (HBI) steel plant in Labuan and a 1.5
million tonne production capacity Hot Direct Reduced Iron (HDRI) steel
plant in Banting.



"I was then the group's plant sales manager. The Lion Group’s
owner, Tan Sri William Chang, has been using our technology since
1984,” Gaines told Bernama at the three-day Steel Success Strategies
conference in New York, the world’s largest steel industry event.




The Lion Group is involved in iron and steel-making,
rolling out flat and long products and downstream manufacturing of
various steel products, including steel service centres.



It operates Megasteel, Malaysia’s first and only integrated flat steel mill, producing hot rolled and cold rolled coils.



Megasteel is fully automated, using state-of-the-art direct current
electric arc furnace, a compact strip production process, which
incorporates thin slab casting technology developed by Germany-based
SMS.



It is the only steel mill in Malaysia to use the advanced CSP

technology which enables the plant to produce high quality steel with significantly higher production yield and energy savings.



The manufacture of long products such as bars, wire rods and
channels is undertaken by Amsteel Mills and Antara Steel Mills, which
are equipped with modern facilities comprising Electric Arc Furnaces,
Ladle Furnaces and 6-strand Continuous Casting Machines.



These facilities are designed to produce high-quality billets
including special grade billets for rolling into specialty bars and
higher grade wire rods for stringent applications.


The Lion Group also operates a HBI plant using the Midrex Direct
Reduction technology that converts iron ore into high-purity Direct
Reduced Iron (DRI) or HBI for iron-making, steel-making and foundry
applications.



Its latest addition, the Direct Reduced Iron (DRI) plant in
Banting, using Midrex technology has a 1.54 million tonne production
capacity per annum.


The increased BRI supply will help reduce dependence on scrap as
raw material for steel-making by the group’s various steel mills.



The group has plans to establish an integrated Blast Furnace
project, with a 2.5 million tonne capacity of liquid hot metal or
certain quantity of pig iron a year, which will replace scrap as the
feedstock for steel-making by the group’s steel mills. -- BERNAMA