Ten weeks in, business at Mississippi Steel Processing is as solid as the 25,000 tons of steel the company flattens and shears each month, MSP President Chip Gerber said Tuesday.
MSP, which began building its plant on the Severstal campus in July 2010, now shapes and sizes the steel produced by Severstal to the specifics of customers in a 500-mile radius.
Gerber, the invited speaker at the Columbus Rotary Club on Tuesday, told the group how MSP had used its unique relationship with Severstal to carve a niche for itself in a still-recovering economy.
Because there”s no freight cost to transport the steel from the mill to the processing plant, MSP brings in higher profit margins and can offer better deals to customers, he said.
Business is so good — to the tune of two to three new customers a week — MSP is already looking to expand its facility and hire additional staff.
“At this rate, we”re going to run out of capacity by the end of this year,” Gerber said of the facility.
MSP is adding another nine employees to its current staff of 21 in upcoming weeks, he said. By the end of 2012, he continued, MSP will likely bring its total number of employees up to between 75 and 100 — that”s 20 to 45 more people than the company agreed to hire in its first three years.
The company also plans to expand its Severstal campus plant over the next five years, bringing its square footage up to 480,000 from 140,000, Gerber said.
But the project didn”t always seem so successful.
Tuesday, Gerber told the club how he came to Columbus from Tennessee in 2007 to head another processing company”s planned plant here only to have the project canned because of the tanking economy.
Another company bought into the idea only to back out also, again because of the economy.
“At that point, I said, ”You know what, I think I”m just going to have to do it myself,”” Gerber recalled.
Believing the project was too sweet an idea to pass up, Gerber scrounged up the necessary financing, tapping a friend from Chicago and a couple of banks, he said.
Now, he said, that hard work and faith in the project is paying off.
“There was a little of that ”build and they will come,” and we”re finally seeing that occur,” he said.
HOW IT”S DONE
The steel processing process at Mississippi Steel Processing:
· MSP gets large sheets of steel from Severstal.
· Then, using specifics from customer centers in a 500-mile radius of Columbus, operators use a 1,500-horsepower machine to flatten the steel.
· After the steel is flattened, it is sheared with 400 tons of pressure into the right length and stacked.
· The stacked sheets are then slit into the right widths with rotary knives using tension and hydraulic pressure.
· The steel can then be cut into shapes with a laser or bent into needed shapes to make brackets or coils.
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