Ispat Inland Inc. is moving up the maintenance outage for No. 6 Blast Furnace at its Indiana Harbor Works in East Chicago. The blast furnace, which typically produces iron at the rate of 2,500 tons a day, has been blown down and cooled so it can be gunned with additional refractory material to extend the life of its refractory lining.

The company will continue to operate the similarly sized No. 5 Blast Furnace and the 11,000 tons/day No. 7 Blast Furnace during the outage.

Beginning this week, Ispat Inland also will accelerate planned maintenance that was scheduled for later this year at the 80-Inch Hot Strip Mill through a series of staged shutdowns. Although the shutdowns will temporarily reduce production capability, they will help to prepare the line for greater production later in the year when demand is expected to be stronger.

"While the economy remains strong, there is currently excess inventory in the system," said Michael G. Rippey, Executive Vice President—Commercial, and Chief Financial Officer. "Considering both current demand and likely demand later in the year, we decided it was better to do this work now," he said.

Ispat Inland Inc. is a subsidiary of Mittal Steel Co. NV, the world's most global steel company. Formed from the combination of Ispat International NV and LNM Holdings NV, Mittal Steel has steelmaking operations in 14 countries, on four continents. For the 12 months that ended Dec. 31, 2004, Mittal Steel had revenues of approximately $22 billion and steel shipments of 42 million tonnes. Mittal Steel encompasses all aspects of modern steelmaking to produce a comprehensive portfolio of both flat and long steel products to serve all the major steel-consuming sectors, including automotive, appliance, machinery and construction.