Mit Green Steel auf Erfolgskurs – Interview mit Swiss Steel-CEO Frank Koch

Well, first of all, a warm welcome to our stand at the Wire and Tube fair. The topic of green steel should not be confused with us describing green products and a green future too readily today. For us, the topic of green steel is more a question derived from society into our products, applications, and the production behind them. That means, quite concretely for us, when we produce steel – we are steel producers purely based on electric steel technology – that we sustainably decarbonize our products through our production processes, which are essentially driven by the consumption of electricity, electrical energy, and natural gas, and to achieve that step by step through our production process. So, we understand the decarbonization of our production processes as sustainable production and decarbonization towards green steel.

There are essentially two different production methods for steel. One way is the blast furnace route, which is classically always in mind when talking about steel, meaning smelting iron ore and coke coal in the blast furnace to molten steel. On our side, we only talk about electrically produced steel, meaning using large amounts of electricity to melt scrap. We use 100% scrap and melt it in the so-called electric arc furnace process to molten steel. This is how we produce our steel, differentiating us by having 5 times fewer CO2 emissions over the entire production process, which doesn't end with melting steel but continues over further heat treatment processes, heating processes of steel, and for that we need natural gas. And we also belong to the largest recyclers in Europe, to the largest recycling companies in Europe, because in principle, everything we use and everything that arises and is discarded in production can be reused, so infinite recyclability of our processes, and just on the basis of 100% steel scrap that we use upfront. And a bit of honesty must remain: besides steel scrap, we also use alloying agents that we need to meet our customer requirements. This is a so-called secondary metallurgical process, and that's what it's about when we discuss in which steps we can decarbonize.

Customers benefit in the sense that everything we deliver as a preliminary product – for example, for a car, a component, or for the food industry – in further processing, understood as an overall concept, contains less CO2. That means we are a preliminary product, which is also called primary industry, primary materials industry, and thus the preliminary product for many applications. And if we have set societal goals – we are now talking first and foremost in Europe, but of course also worldwide according to the Paris climate goals – the customers benefit by being able to say that the products we supply come a significant step closer to the goals we have set ourselves, which are then transported through politics.

I have talked about the topic of the construction industry. Let's come to the actual business model as well. In the past, it was very often that the alloy and the technical application were the only thing, meaning the alloy composition was in the foreground. Today, through innovation and cooperation with our customers, we take a slightly different path. We leave out the old way of thinking and instead start from the technology and ask what is needed to achieve the actual goals behind it. In this case, if we take the construction industry, it's always about needing high loads – if you take balconies or any extensions – but you also need steels that don't rust and still perform the actual effect of reinforcement. So, we went ahead and, through our innovation teams, developed steels that require fewer alloying agents, thus reducing the CO2 footprint in the so-called scope 3 through the extraction and production of alloying agents, and thus finding a way to use other steel grades for the applications that our customers actually need every day.

I am here today on the first day at Wire and Tube. I have the feeling that it is a very vital fair. People are glad to be able to meet again. You meet people whom you have only met on screen for years or for two years – by the way, also many employees who travel here from far away. The conclusion is very positive. We have a high turnout. We didn't just change our logo about a year and a half ago, but our group is also changing very strongly. We have a different group structure, we have issued a new strategy, and to discuss all this and be able to explain it personally to people again is a huge advantage.

Thank you for being with us.