ArcelorMittal Asturias in Spain is celebrating the shipment of 100,000 tonnes of steel plates to customer STX France, with the most recent order having left the port of El Musel in Spain last week.
This 2,400-tonne delivery, destined for the customer’s shipyard in St Nazaire, France, brings the volume of steel plates supplied up to the 100,000 tonne milestone, since deliveries began in September 2013.
Two ArcelorMittal France sites have also collectively delivered 30,000 tonnes of steel products to STX France since 2013. ArcelorMittal Flats Products’ Fos-sur-Mer site produces steel coils which are then transformed by ArcelorMittal SSC in Saint-Nazaire into sheets for the ships’ decks.
The steel plates made in ArcelorMittal’s Heavy Plate Mill in Gijón, Spain and steel sheets made in France have so far been used by STX France to build the world’s largest cruise ship, ‘Harmony of the Seas’.
ArcelorMittal’s steel was used to build the hull and decks of ‘Harmony of the Seas’, a giant puzzle of more than 400,000 metal parts with capacity for 6,400 passengers and a crew of 2,400, built for the Royal Caribbean Cruise Line. The project posed an exciting challenge for ArcelorMittal due to the stringent requirements involved, in terms of punctuality, regularity, reliability, and quality - a challenge that the teams at ArcelorMittal Asturias (plates), ArcelorMittal Fos-sur-Mer (coils) and ArcelorMittal Distribution Solutions Saint-Nazaire (sheets) were more than prepared to meet. Their close cooperation with the customer enabled STX France to complete the construction of the ship’s steel shell on schedule, in June 2015.
As an acknowledgement of this result, STX awarded ArcelorMittal its Best Supplier accolade in the ‘Long Term Cooperation’ category at their Supplier Symposium, which took place on 3 May 2016 aboard the ‘Harmony of the Seas’ cruise ship. Reiner Blaschek, CMO for ArcelorMittal Europe – Flat Products’ Business Division North, accepted this prestigious award.
The successful partnership between the two companies led to STX France selecting ArcelorMittal as the preferred supplier of flat steel for the construction of new ships.
The deliveries will allow STX France to build four more new ships between now and 2018, all of them built using ArcelorMittal’s steel.
Of the four ships, one is currently in outfitting phase (hull entirely completed) while the hull of the second is close to completion. The third ship is under construction and the cutting of plates has just started for the fourth.
