“Thanks to our motivated and highly qualified team, the plant was able to reach design capacity in just six months and has since gone from strength to strength. We supply over 500,000 metric tons of 64.8% Fe pellets to NLMK Lipetsk every month. The induration machine is running at 789 metric tons/hour, as expected. Achieving all the set goals will enable us to ensure NLMK Group’s control over raw material costs,” said Sergey Napolskikh, general director of NLMK’s Stoilensky unit.

The US$680 million plant, one of the largest in Europe, has a capacity of 6 million metric tons annually, but was designed to allow for a future expansion that could increase its capacity by 20%.