Blast furnace 2 at the ThyssenKrupp CSA steel mill in Santa Cruz/Rio de Janeiro state was fired up on schedule and without problems on Thursday evening, December 16, 2010 - five months after blast furnace 1, which is now producing over 6,500 metric tons of top-quality hot metal per day, close to its full capacity, according to Thyssenkrupp’s press release.

The report says "I expect the ramp-up of our second blast furnace to be just as successful and that next fiscal year the plant will be able to operate at its full capacity," said Edwin Eichler, the ThyssenKrupp AG Executive Board member responsible for the Materials division. "This further milestone in our forward strategy will allow us to reach our objective of generating a profit in the Steel Americas business area in 2012/2013”…..

In addition to blast furnace 1, the two 330 t converters have been in operation since early September and early November. The first slab was produced on September 7. Slabs from Brazil have now arrived in Duisburg and Mobile/Alabama; once full capacity is reached, 3 million tons of slabs per year will be shipped to Alabama and 2 million tons to the German processing plants. "We weren't expecting the material to be of such excellent quality in the first phase," said Eichler. "The slabs even met the high requirements of tinplate production."

The first blast furnace at ThyssenKrupp CSA in Brazil was fired up in July 2010….

ThyssenKrupp plans to achieve profitable growth in key international markets of the future. A central element of this is the expansion of the company's core carbon flat steel business. This year, global crude steel production will once again reach record levels with an output of around 1.4 billion metric tons. Around 200 to 250 million tons of this is premium flat carbon steel. ThyssenKrupp is focused on this segment, and this is where its strength lies….

With an investment budget of €5.2 billion, the new integrated iron and steel mill built by ThyssenKrupp in the state of Rio de Janeiro is the biggest industrial investment project in Brazil in the past ten years and the first major steel mill to be built in the country since the mid-1980s.

The Brazilian iron ore producer Vale holds a share of 26.87% in the subsidiary ThyssenKrupp CSA Siderúrgica do Atlântico. The project includes the construction of a state-of-the-art plant complex with its own port terminal for importing coal and exporting the slabs, raw material handling facilities, coke plant, sinter plant, two blast furnaces, a BOF melt shop and a power plant.”