China Steel Corp (中鋼), Taiwan’s biggest steelmaker, said yesterday its board approved a proposal to take a 1 percent stake in a Brazilian iron ore mining company as part of its long-term investment plans.
The company would pay ¥8.5 billion (US$94.5 million) to buy a 0.5 percent stake in Namisa SA from Japan’s Sumitomo Metal Industries Ltd and another 0.5 percent stake in the Brazilian company from Itochu Corp, Kaohsiung-based China Steel said in an e-mailed statement.
China Steel said the stake purchase from the two Japanese companies would help it implement a long-term plan to forge a “strategic alliance with either Japanese or South Korean steel mills,” the statement said.
Namisa, with an output of approximately 13 million tonnes of iron ore a year, is controlled by Companhia Siderurgica Nacional SA (CSN), Brazil’s third-largest steelmaker.
In December last year, CSN sold a 40 percent stake in Namisa to a group of Asian investors — including Sumitomo, Itochu, Nippon Steel Corp and South Korean steel giant POSCO — for around US$3.1 billion.
China Steel’s investment in Namisa is also likely to assist the Taiwanese steelmaker in securing its supply of raw materials after it said on Nov. 26 that the world’s three major iron ore miners — BHP Billiton Ltd, Rio Tinto PLC and Vale SA — are likely to increase iron ore prices by between 30 percent and 35 percent next year.
China Steel imports up to 17 million tonnes of iron ore every year for its various products. The company did not say how much iron ore it can obtain from the investment in Namisa each year, which is still subject to approval from the Brazilian company’s shareholders and government agencies.
The company’s board yesterday also gave a green light to spending NT$2.37 billion (US$31 million) on upgrading its No. 1 bar mill in three years and agreed to take a US$58.55 million loan to hedge against its Vietnam investment.
China Steel said it invested an initial US$58.5 million in a joint venture with Sumitomo in August.
To mitigate possible foreign currency exchange losses, the company said in the same statement that it would take the three-year loan to hedge the potential risk.
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