Since there doesnt seem to be a enough of a understanding of the ferroalloy market, let me share one of the key producers of ferroalloys, Ukraine and also the Privat group, which went bankrupt a few years back. This was also the former owner of consmin, which tried to launch a failed hostile takeover of om holdings a decade ago.
https://www.kyivpost.com/ukraine-po...r-kolomoiskys-steel-empire.html?cn-reloaded=1
Few people in Warren, Ohio or Mason County, West Virginia have ever heard of Ihor Kolomoisky. Yet both U.S. cities are home to steel plants that have been run by the Ukrainian oligarch for more than 10 years.Kolomoisky used the plants as keystones of an attempt to corner the global ferroalloy market, building an empire that extended from the American to the ferroalloy plants along the Dnipro River.
The buyouts led Kolomoisky’s companies to, at one point, control more than 40 percent of the world manganese trade and more than half of the United States’ output of silicomanganese – a crucial resource for forging structural steel.But with the recent fall in global commodities prices and the Ukrainian government intent on reining in oligarchs, Kolomoisky has been put on the retreat.One of the main holding companies for the Dnipro, Ukraine, native’s U.S. factories has declared bankruptcy, while his biggest Australian mining venture, which included operations in Ghana, was sold to Chinese investors in November last year – along with the company’s $400 million debt.“Kolomoisky has suffered significant losses, but he hasn’t lost everything,” said Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the PENTA political research center in Kyiv.Court filings reveal that Kolomoisky was divvying up and fighting over the rusting U.S. steel mills with other Ukrainian oligarchs – in the same way that they fought over Ukraine’s Soviet-built industrial plants in the 1990s and 2000s. One deal, involving Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, bled into the sale of a Warren, Ohio steel mill.Much of this is revealed through legal filings made by Vadim Shulman, a Krivyi Rih businessman and partner of Kolomoisky, who fell out with him over a deal gone wrong involving Warren, and who has filed subpoenas in several U.S. states as apparent warning shots in preparation for a potential later lawsuit. Shulman also sued Kolomoisky directly in the United States, demanding $3 million in damages before a judge dismissed the case.Kolomoisky, whose network of companies is called Privat Group, is undergoing financial troubles that echo those of the communities where he ran factories. Many of his assets have now shut down or scaled back production as Privat Group undergoes financial tremors in the wake of the nationalization of PrivatBank, the empire’s “core,” Fesenko said.Pat Gallagher of United Steelworkers in Warren, Ohio, said Warren supplied around 200 jobs. “It’s a loss to any community when you lose that,” he said.An employee of Felman Production, a West Virginia silicomanganese plant controlled by Kolomoisky, said that the company doesn’t receive enough money to operate safely.Kolomoisky did not comment.Jason Chudoba, a spokesman for his U.S. firms, declined to comment
