The envelopes of the offers to take over the former Lucchini steel complex in Piombino are now on the table of the Extraordinary Commissioner, ready to be evaluated and sent to the Supervisory Committee of the Ministry.
The initiative to proceed along the path of purchase belongs to the two "only" real offers made in these long months: on the one hand the Indian Jsw which belongs to the steel oligarch Jindal and on the other the Algerian company Cevital .
Both offers seem to respond to the parameters of the tender: safeguarding of the iron and steel site, continuity of the production range, maximum attention to employment levels.
To date, the Algerian offer seems to be the most accredited for the production and commercial strategy at the basis of its industrial design.
Algeria is a net importing country of steel. The Brescians have counted on that market in recent years to adjust their accounts. It is a young country (over 40% of the population is under 20); it is hungry for infrastructure, for homes, for work. It has an infinite natural wealth of gas and, most importantly, modern extraction, storage, transport and distribution networks. Italy is one of its main customers.
Producing steel in Piombino with the installation of electric furnace technology, using the pre-reduction of iron ore, will be a business for the Algerians able to recover in the short term the acquisition investment, to exploit low-cost gas in Algeria cost for the pre-reduction, to produce all the steel necessary for one's needs and to satisfy the Mediterranean market in competition with the fierce Turkish steel industry.
All the Maghreb, from Egypt to Morocco, reluctant to Ankara's political and economic hegemony, will find in the Algerian steel produced in Piombino not only a competitive supplier but also support for its plan of independence.
Reasons that are intertwined with each other and which are at the basis of the favorable option for Cevital expressed by the people of Piombino through the mouth of their mayor.
The Indian Jndal looks to the establishment on the Tyrrhenian Sea as a reinforcement in Europe and in the Mediterranean of an empire that had grown (like that of Mittal) on the Indian continent thanks to the protective network of the Governments of Delhi and the protection of the duties which guarantee a limited oligarchy a market of over a billion people.
The "Bresciani" have been watching and have not put forward any interesting proposal except to try in every way to stay at the bidding table in the hope of being able to profit from a stew represented by a small part of the rolling mills that Piombino has.
From the "general" offer for the Caleotto di Lecco train, to the desire to ally with "this or that" for a possible pre-reduction plant to be built in Piombino, they appeared as unattainable wishes aimed at the sole purpose of easing the hunger for scrap, a vital raw material for Brescia and by now increasingly rare and increasingly expensive.
An availability put there in words, without offering an array, even formal, of the major private producers, for years able to hope for corporate synergies and production rationalizations between them but which continue, in reality, to follow the old road of managerial individualities and proprietary, cruel mirror of isolation and surrender.
The 21 million tons of steel churned out this year by the Italian steel industry will see a "physical" replacement of producers in the next few years. Indians and Algerians (taking into account the short-term outcome of Taranto's destinies) will be the ones to determine this mutation of the species.
For our entrepreneurs in the sector, the future will belong to those few capable of high production quality and of staying on the regional market: the one within a radius of 900-1000 kilometres. Transformers of scrap and producers of rebar for reinforced concrete or medium quality wire rods will find it very difficult for them to stay on the market and give breath to a new season of success and leadership.
