Sheffield Forgemasters secures £4.5m Russian and German roll deals

Sheffield Forgemasters has won two new contracts worth more than £4.5m with Russian and German steel companies.

The multimillion-pound deals are for a range of work and back-up rolls which will be supplied to Russian steel giant Severstal and to Germany’s only tinplate manufacturer ThyssenKrupp Rasselstein.

The finished rolls, which will be produced and machined at Forgemasters’ Sheffield base and delivered throughout next year, will be used in cold rolling mills to roll sheets for automotive car body panels and white goods at Severstal’s plant in Cherepovets in northwestern Russia.

The rolls for Rasselstein’s production facility in Andernach in western Germany will be supplied for the production of tin plate to make food packaging and aerosol cans.

Ken Brooks, senior sales manager at Forgemasters, said: “We first began working with Severstal in 1999 and in that 17 years Forgemasters now supplies more steel rolls to Severstal than any other roll maker. In fact, our share of supply to them has increased as the demand for domestic steel continues to be substantial.

“Forgemasters is now responsible for providing around three quarters of Severstal’s entire steel roll requirement.

“Both new contracts are testimony to the strength of our long standing relationships with both these companies as well as our position in the global steel market.

“Our expertise and development of state-of-the-art techniques allow us to deliver the highest quality products across the world.”

The rolls will be produced by forging each steel ingot and heat treatment a process that exposes the rolls to temperatures from +900 degrees to -85 degrees to create highly specific hardness properties.

The rolls will then be machine finished to within 0.05mm using computer controlled machine tools at Forgemasters.

Severstal products are exported to more than fifty countries while Rasselstein’s facility is the world’s largest production facility for packaging steel producing tinned and special chromium coated steel for a variety of packaging solutions.