Teesport's loss of steel mill will cut revenue 20pc

TEESPORT, located on the north east coast of England and the UK's third largest port, is expected to suffer a 20 per cent drop in annual revenue following an announcement earlier this month by Anglo-Dutch steel maker Corus that it will close a nearby steel mill.

As chiefly a bulk and breakbulk port, Teesport handled between eight and nine million tons of coal and iron ore imports and exported 2.5 million tons of steel slabs for the steel mill annually, reports Newark's Journal of Commerce. This figure accounted for more than one quarter of Teesport's 40 million ton total throughput last year that included 100,000 TEU.

It blamed the closure of the steel mill to the decision by an international consortium to walk away from a deal to purchase around 80 per cent of its output over the next decade, a move which will cost 1,700 jobs.

This development comes in the wake of earlier warnings by Teesport parent PD Ports that it would make 120 of its 600 employees redundant if Corus, the European unit of India's Tata Steel, shut the steel mill.

PD Ports has since been sold by Australia's Babcock and Brown Infrastructure (BBI) to Canadian investment fund, Brookfield Asset Management, for a token A$1.00(US$0.93).

The report added that BBI acquired PD Ports in 2006 for around $955 million including debt. In early 2009 it put the company up for sale for a reported asking price of $700 million but reduced this amount to around $480 million a few months later on fears Corus might close its plant.

London Daily Telegraph columnist Christopher Booker, author of The Real Global Warming Disaster, said the steel mill shutdown has much to do with the carbon scare put out by the UN global warming activists. "We shall all be paying to export thousands of British jobs to new steel plants in India for no gain in the reduction of worldwide CO2 emissions," he wrote.

"In India, Corus's owner, Tata, plans to increase steel production from 53 million tonnes to 124 million. Thus, at the end of the day, Redcar will lose its biggest employer. Tata will get its new steel plants - while the net amount of CO2 emitted worldwide will not have been reduced a jot," he said.

Mr Booker also noted that Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN's International Panel on Climate Change, has been director-general since 1981 of the Tata-funded Tata Energy Research Institute.

(Source: www.schednet.com)