I was a career metallurgist at Comsteel/Molycop, into which I invested 52 years of my intellectual energy making stainless steel, tool steel and every engineering steel in the textbook.
It was a shock, but not a surprise to learn that the steelmaking and bar mill departments will close at the end of December. These departments are the victims of ridiculously high gas and electricity prices in Australia and very cheap (and subsidised) steel from China. This cheap steel is a consequence of construction and manufacturing cutbacks in China so they have millions of tonnes of steel to dump on the world markets. It is also now cheaper to send a shipping container from Shanghai to Newcastle than it is to rail a container from Sydney to Newcastle. So much for the so-called level playing field or "flat earth policy" of international trading where it only seems to be flat on our side of the earth.
