Nippon Steel & Sumikin Stainless Steel (NSSC) announced on Tuesday the firm, Sumitomo Corporation and Sichuan Southeast Stainless Steel agreed to launch stainless cold rolling joint venture in Nantong, Jiangsu for around 1.5 billion yuan. The joint venture launches Sendzimir mills with annual 200,000 tonnes of output capacity in June 2014 to follow high grade stainless market in China.
The joint venture, JS (Nantong) Stainless Steel is NSSC’s first offshore production base. The firm provides chrome series stainless hot rolled coil for the joint venture. NSSC has 25% share in the joint venture with 600 million yuan of capital. Sichuan Southeast Stainless Steel has 40% share and Sumitomo Corp. and the subsidiary have 35% share in the joint venture. The joint venture with around 260 of employees targets 60 billion yen of annual sales. The plant has 2 Sendzimir mills, cold annealing and a pickling facility and finishing and other related equipments. The plant makes products with 0.3-3 millimeters thick. The plant supplies nickel series commodity grade stainless steel and NSSC’s high grade products. Sichuan Southeast Stainless Steel provides annual around 160,000 tonnes of nickel series stainless hot coil for the joint venture while NSSC provides around 40,000 tonnes of FW-series and automotive exhaust grade chrome series stainless hot coil.