POSCO, South Korea’s largest steelmaker, opened its fourth hot strip rolling mill at its Gwangyang plant that will supply sheet metal to carmakers round the world.

The steelmaking conglomerate said the new mill in South Jeolla Province, will churn out 3.3 million tons of steel products annually.

It said the sheet metal from the mill can be made to order to meet specific needs of customers. POSCO said the sheets can be made as thin as 1.2 millimeter or as thick as 22 mm, with the width ranging from 700 mm all the way up to 1,950 mm.

“The products made will be shipped to car manufacturers outside the country, with very little being used in the country,” the company said. POSCO counts Volkswagen, Ford, Toyota and Nissan as its customers.

POSCO chairman Kwon Oh-joon said at the ceremony to mark the completion of the mill’s construction that the new facility will help the steelmaker maintain and advance its global position as a supplier of top quality plates for automobiles.

Meanwhile, POSCO reported a 58 percent decline in third-quarter profit this week, worse than analysts estimated, due to currency losses and slowing global demand.

Slowing economic growth in China, which makes up half of the world’s steel demand, continued to sap the nation’s consumption of the alloy this year. This has caused prices to drop and squeezed profits at steelmakers globally.

“For the industry demand to pick up, we can only hope that China will cut its production through restructuring,” Kim Hyun Tae, a steel sector analyst at KB Investment & Securities in Seoul. “The domestic steel industry is doing better than China, but it’s still not in good shape.” (Yonhap)