PT Gunung Raja Paksi Tbk (GRP), one of the largest privately-owned steel mills in Indonesia, plans to commission its first-ever 580 cu m blast furnace in the second quarter of this year if the construction work progresses according to plan, a company official shared on February 17.
With the commissioning of the first blast furnace, GRP, located in Cikarang Barat, West Java of Indonesia, covering more than 200 hectares, will be able to expand its steelmaking capacity by 700,000 tonnes/year and supplement the operations of its two existing electric arc furnaces (EAFs).
Currently, of the two EAFs GRP is operating one is a 105 tonne-unit with a designed 820,000 t/y steelmaking capacity, and the other at 120 t has 1 million t/y crude steel capacity, according to the company official, though both the furnaces are running below their designed capacities, he explained.
GRP, incorporated in 1970 as a family business, was listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange in September 2019. The steelmaker has been in the process of expanding both its upstream and downstream steel capacities, according to the official, and once the new blast furnace is up and running, it may provide semis to expand GRP’s output of hot-rolled coils (HRCs) and plates.
For now, GRP produces mainly sections including H-beams, I-beams and angles, as well as medium plates and HRC, though it is also capable of producing about 400,000 t/y of wire rod, and deformed and round bars, the official explained.
GRP is also running two cold-rolling mills at its North Sumatra plant, one being four-stand and the other six-stand. These together can produce a total of 1.2 million t/y cold-rolled coils at 1.2-2mm in thickness.
“Since our stock exchange listing, we have been striving to upgrade our operations from a family business to a professionally-run entity,” he said. “We have also been actively looking for Chinese partners that can either help us to manage our steel operations for higher efficiency, lower cost, and technological upgrading or that can invest in us to maximize our brand name and support us in going bigger or even going regional.”
GRP is rather optimistic about the Indonesian and ASEAN regional steel market prospects. “Our mainstream products have great potentials in the domestic market, especially with the government investing heavily in the infrastructure construction, and the ASEAN region is also full of business chances,” the company official said with great confidence.
An official from a Chinese company showed interest when told about GRP. “Wire rod and bars are with the fiercest competition in the ASEAN region, but GRP’s focus on other steel products than construction steel makes it more attractive to the potential Chinese partners, I believe,” she commented.
Written by Hongmei Li, li.hongmei@mysteel.com
This article has been published under an article exchange agreement between Mysteel Global and SteelMint.
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