Displaying items by tag: Sweden

UK: Sweden’s LKAB Minerals has signed a deal to buy Francis Flower. The acquisition is intended to bring a portfolio of sustainable products into LKAB Minerals’ portfolio. Implementation of the agreement is subject to Austrian merger clearance. Both parties are confident that the merger control process will be completed by the end of November 2018. No value for the agreement has been disclosed.

Francis Flower is a family owned business, and the main shareholder is the current chairman and chief executive officer (CEO), Adrian Willmott, who upon completion of the sale will resign his position in the business but remain available in a consultancy capacity during an integration phase. The company will be integrated into LKAB Minerals’ existing UK business under the leadership of Darren Wilson, who manages the UK and European business within LKAB Minerals.

Francis Flower recycles blast furnace slag from the steel industry for production of ground granulated blast furnace slag for use in cement production, among other offerings for industrial and agricultural use. It employs 130 people across four sites in the UK: Scunthorpe, Wicken, Gurney Slade and Runcorn.

LKAB Minerals in the UK has a similar size business across four sites and employs around 160 people. Its main operations are processing and marketing of minerals, primarily for the building, construction, polymer, coating, refractory and foundry industries.

“We have an ambition of growing the industrial minerals business significantly over time, to balance LKAB’s growing iron ore production,” said Leif Boström, Senior Vice President for the Special Products Division in LKAB and CEO of LKAB Minerals group. “This will strengthen LKAB Minerals’ offering to the building and construction industries.”

Ireland: Eocem Ireland has introduced new corporate branding following growth in the Ecocem Group across Europe. The rebrand has been timed to tie in with group integration and new product launches. The ground granulated blast furnace slag (GGBS) producer has adopted a new logo with a company tagline – ‘Innovation Powering Sustainability’ – to accentuate the group’s innovation and environmental sustainability. Ecocem says that the rebrand of Ecocem Ireland, which is tied in with a rebrand across the group, is an indication of the revised focus of the group over the coming years.

“It is an exciting time for the Ecocem Group as there are many areas that we are working on with our innovation teams that will bring targeted solutions to customers across Ireland and the UK enabling them to benefit from using increased percentages of GGBS within their market offerings,” said Micheál McKittrick, the Managing Director for Ecocem Ireland.

Ecocem says it is Europe’s largest independent specialist producer of GGBS cement with a capacity of 2.4Mt/yr. Developments in the organisation have seen a growing interaction across its operating regions in Ireland, Holland, France, UK and Sweden, as well as the emergence of new products. Ecocem Ireland is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Ecocem Materials and it operates a slag grinding plant in Dublin Port.

Sweden: Boliden is interested in extracting vanadium from slag heaps owned by SSAB. The mining and smelting company has reportedly been interested in this process for several years and has developed an extraction method. Boliden was due to be updated on the matter by SSAB in March 2016, according to Esmerk Swedish News.

However, Finnish company Mustavaaran Kaivos is considered the most likely to cooperate with SSAB. The company plans to relaunch vanadium extraction in Finland, and has developed a high temperature method. The development has been supported by SSAB, Swedish research foundation Mistra, Swedish mining company LKAB and Finnish steel company Rautaruukki.

Sweden: Ovako has signed a contract with NCC to supply steel slag to be used as ballast in asphalt. As part of the contract, NCC will buy 50,000t/yr for the first three years and then 85,000t/yr. The road surface should be quieter, more durable and more sustainable, according to NCC-run tests in Borlänge.