This year looks promising and the company has good expectations about the near future. As long as the oil price stays at more than $80/barrel, it encourages investments in the exploration and drilling sector and this keeps orders for the pipelines made in Romania going, says Gabriel Podskubka, who runs the Eastern Europe division of the Tenaris group and is also the chairman and chief executive officer of TenarisSilcotub Zalau.
There is also significant demand in the electricity business, with many power plants being built worldwide at the moment, which benefits Silcotub, as well, he added.
The company in Zalau (NW Romania) controlled by Tenaris, a world leading pipeline maker, expects revenue to go up by 10% to 20% this year, from the EUR340 million of 2011.
Podskubka says he expects demand from Europe to decline. However, Romania’s geographical position allows the plants the group owns here to export to every continent of the world.
Tenaris created a network of products and countries that allows it to keep production level unchanged, even though demand from one region might be lower at some time, its official says. The important export destinations in Europe are Germany and Italy, while the United States and Canada are new yet important markets for the group.
Tenaris also owns a steel mill in Calarasi (south of Romania), whose capacity stands at 500,000 tons of steel and exports half of its output to Canada to a plant that Tenaris bought in 2000 and does not have its own steel mill.
The facility in Zalau has a capacity of 250,000 tons of pipes a year, fuelled by the steel mill in Calarasi, which it has no intention of increasing any time soon, Podskubka says, adding that Romania is capable of producing steel in a very competitive manner, because the process is highly automated.
Company officials say that out of the about 1,000 employees of the plant in Zalau, only 200 are involved in the manufacturing process directly, while the rest are white-collar workers. Tenaris is currently employing 1,500 people in Romania.
TenarisSilcotub made the highest profit on the steel market in Romania in 2011, EUR25.5 million. The ‘secret’ was the high automation of the operations of the two plants and the constant efficiency improvement via investments.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)