Russian company buys Rouge Steel

[Dr Mordrid]

It's being bought by Russias OAO Severstal. Rouge Steel is a Detroit area landmark founded by Henry Ford that has supplied the US auto industry since the 1920's. Rouge Steel is itself located on a portion of the Ford Rouge manufacturing facility.

An industrial city in itself, the entire Rouge facility coveres 1,300 acres with 23 miles of roadways, 100 miles of railroad tracks and more than a mile of docks facing storage bins capable of holding 2 million tons of raw materials.

Much of the Rouge facility will remain in Fords hands as they still have major manufacturing facilities on the site.

Info;

Headquarters: Dearborn, MI USA

Annual steel output: 2.5 million US tons

Major customers: Ford, General Motors and DaimlerChrysler AG

Employees: 2,600 with ~2,000 unionized

Annual sales: $1.13 billion USD

Guess some aspects the Russian economic recovery are going well

Dr. Mordrid

[GuchiGuh]

wait until the sleeping dragon awakes......can't wait.

[az]

Doc, what's your point? (honest question - I don't believe you're just posting news that everyone of us can read in a newspaper if he/she chooses to, so there must be something you're trying to say with it, which I don't get. Please fill me in.)

AZ

[Gurm]

Did Ford really name a steelworks after a type of ladies' cosmetic?

- Gurm

[bsdgeek]

Where you been, Homer? The entire steel industry is gay. Eh, aerospace, too, and the railroads. And you know what else? Broadway. -- Moe

[Gurm]

I was sort of poking a teeny tiny bit of fun at Doc, see...

Like, is it "rouge" or "rogue"?

- Gurm

[bsdgeek]

The Simpsons quote just seemed like it fit, so I posted it.

Otherwise, I'm not sure I get you here Gurm. It is Rouge.

[Dr Mordrid]

Originally posted by Gurm
Did Ford really name a steelworks after a type of ladies' cosmetic?

- Gurm

The facility is on the Rouge River, which roughly divides the southern portion of the city of Detroit from Dearborn and the downriver cities before it empties into the southern stream of the Detroit River.

My point was that Russian industry is coming around enough to make acquistions overseas. If this is good or bad is the point of discussion.

Dr. Mordrid

[GNEP]

What has always confused me (in an "acting naive" way) is this:

Before the fall of communism, there were already some rather large businesses in the USSR, owned by the state. Now, a mere 15 years or whatever later, we have those same businesses in the constituent countries, (although mainly Russia it has to be said), but owned not by a load of shareholders, pension funds and the like as in the Anglo-Saxon model, or by old spread-out families as per the European model (mixed in with the pension funds & myriad individual shareholders), or as it is in Japan. Instead these multi-billion dollar companies have ownership concentrated in the hands of a very few, often relatively young, individuals.

How did they do that? Surely these companies, before the dismantlement of the State, belonged to the "People" so equitably shares would have been distributed to the "People"...

These individuals in charge would never have got into this position through corrupt officials, dodgy western money and outright extortion and murder, could they? Nah... of course not - they are just bright entrepreneurs who just happened to be in the right place at the right time, right???

[lecter]

That and the occassional petroleum-train hijacking to Latvia, as was Mr. Abramovich's case

[KvHagedorn]

It's all owned by the Russian mafia.

[GNEP]

Well, soon large parts of it will have been purchased by western multinationals, making this probably the largest single money laundering operation in history.