Romania plans to resume operation of Otelu Rosu steel plant

UMB's new investor will invest over €300 million to restart the company, which has been idle since 2013

Romania plans to restart the operation of the Otelu Rosu steel plant, which has been idle since 2013. This is reported by SeeNews.

The Otelu Rosu steel plant is equipped with a 100-ton electric arc furnace, which was last modernized in 2011.

The company has been sold many times, including in 2005 by Ductil Steel Buzau, a group that was part of the Russian Mechel. In 2013, Mechel sold all of its Romanian assets to the local company Invest Nikarom. In 2019, LDME acquired the assets of the Otelu Rosu plant, and in early 2024, it became known that Romanian businessman Dorinel Umbrarescu, owner of the construction company UMB Group, purchased the plant for €12 million. The investor plans to manufacture metal structures necessary for the group’s construction activities at the plant.

Recently, it became known that UMB plans to invest more than €300 million in the restart of the enterprise.

«The investment will ensure the production of steel structures needed for infrastructure projects in Romania. The commissioning of the plant, located in the western county of Caras Severin, will create more than 600 jobs,» comments Romanian Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu.

Otelu Rosu specializes in the production of low-, medium-, high-carbon and high-alloy billets, which are then rolled into rebar, wire or other specialty products. The plant’s design production capacity is 850 thousand tons of steel per year.

There is one operating blast furnace steel mill in Romania, Liberty Galati. Its capacity reaches 3.2 million tons of steel per year and 2.1 million tons of iron per year. In 2022, Romania produced 2.6 million tons of steel, compared to 3.3 million tons in 2021 and 2.7 million tons in 2020.

As GMK Center reported earlier, Turkey’s Ussuri Capital plans to build a new low-carbon flat-rolled steel plant in Romania. The project envisages the installation of an electric arc furnace with an annual capacity of 1.2 million tons of steel and a continuous casting line using CSP or ESP technology with an annual capacity of 1.2 million tons of hot-rolled coils.