The company ArcelorMittal, one of the largest and most important economic entities in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), is on the verge of survival.
The company achieved disastrous results last year, and the latest announcements from the company that are arriving these days are not at all optimistic.
According to the data of this portal, the company’s revenues last year amounted to 732.8 million BAM, which is a dramatic drop compared to 1.54 million BAM in 2022. Therefore, the revenues for the year were reduced by about 320 million BAM or about 30 percent, which would affect every company.
Last year, the company recorded a net loss of 159 million BAM. The net profit in 2022 was 41 million BAM, and in 2021 it was more than 200 million BAM. Accumulated losses at the end of 2023 amount to 201 million BAM, which represents a reduction of the company’s capital by 45 percent.
The biggest factors affecting the company’s financial performance in 2023 were that shipments of finished products were at their lowest level in 14 years, due to lower demand of 12 percent compared to the previous year, as well as a 20 percent increase in the price of electricity, which results in additional annual costs of four million BAM.
Also, the average selling prices of steel were 22 percent lower in 2023 compared to 2022, and there was also a significant increase (20 million BAM) in salary costs of 16 percent.
The company said last week that it is trying to find ways to get out of the current situation, given that due to the low price of steel on the world market, they are facing major challenges in business.
Among other things, they decided to suspend the production of coke and said that this is just one of the steps they plan to take in the future in this regard.
“We are working on a plan where we will redeploy our employees from coke plant who are very good workers and have been with us for a very long time. We would not like to lose employees who have been with us for many years. We will reassign them to our other work units,” announced the director Nikhil Mehta.
He points out that he will try to keep as many workers as possible in Zenica, while he will try to take care of the excess workers in his plant in Germany or some other European countries. It is planned to take care of about 15 percent of the workers from that department in this way. Coke plant employs a total of 200 workers.
Zenica company Mittal employs around 2,200 workers. A total of about 3,000 workers are employed by Mittal in Zenica and Prijedor, but there is a whole chain of companies and companies they cooperate with.
“We know that one worker in the metal industry attracts at least four more workers in secondary and tertiary industries. It is about 10,000 workers who work in the chain called ArcelorMittal, and if you multiply that by 3-4 family members, that’s 40,000 people,” said last year Kenan Mujkanovic, president of the Zenica-Doboj Canton (ZDC) Metalworkers’ Union.
The fall of Mittal would be a big blow to the entire economy of BiH, BHRT writes.
