Introduction
Corus was formed in 1999 with the merger of British Steel and Hoogovens from the Netherlands, making it the 5th largest steelmaker at the time. British Steel Corporation (BSC) was formed in 1967 from the UK's 14 main steel producers and enabled the reshaping of the steel industry in UK after years of insufficient capital investment. BSC has gone under many radical restructuring projects since and in 2001 their workforce was about 22.000 compared to almost 300.000 in the 70s. Steel is one of the world's major industries and these problems have hit the whole industry not just only British Steel and these downturns because of excess world steel capacity, reducing demands and price reductions where the main reasons for the merger with Hoogovens, as with other mergers in the steel industry. In the beginning BSC was owned by the government but in 1988 the company was privatized.
Hoogovens was formed in 1918 by the Dutch state, companies and private investors but it wasn't until 6 years later that their iron production begun. In the 60s the company changed their strategy and decided to diversify manly into aluminum smelting and mining. In the 70s Hoogovens went into joint venture with Hoesch of Germany to form Estel, but after years of crisis in the steel industry the co-operative agreement was dissolved in 1982. Hoogovens went under some mergers and acquisitions during those years to expand and diversify their business and to gain economic of scale and with the acqusition of Kaiser Aluminium in 1987 Hoogevens became the fourth largest producer of rolled and extruded aluminum in Europe.
World Steel Industry
Steel is one of the world's major industries with the world production at 788 million tons in 1999. Production was mainly for home consumption with levels of imports and exports very low between countries with their own industry. Exporting where usually only to countries without a steel making capacity. Changes in global environment had huge...