Inland Steel Industries Inc. said Thursday it is quitting the business of making steel plates to concentrate on more lucrative products and will shut down the section of its East Chicago, Ind., plant that has performed that function.
The action had been expected for several years and will cost 500 of Inland’s 10,000 employees their jobs by the end of the year. The company said they will be offered early retirement or be laid off.
The plate mill dates from about 1910 and processes steel slabs manufactured elsewhere into products for agricultural and construction equipment. It is considered a stand-alone operation within Inland’s 1,000-acre mill on Lake Michigan’s south shore.
The rest of the complex will not be affected by the plate operation shutdown.
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A spokeswoman for the Chicago-based company–the nation’s sixth-largest steelmaker–said the plate production of 400,000 tons last year was a relatively small proportion of the company’s total production of 5.2 million tons of steel.
The company’s main business will remain the production of galvanized or coated steel for the auto industry, cold-rolled steel for appliance manufacture and special bar products for a variety of industrial uses.
“The economics of the plate business today have forced us to exit,” said Maurice S. Nelson, president and chief executive of the company’s Inland Steel Co. subsidiary.
The plate operation shutdown is part of a continuing trimming of Inland’s payroll to keep the company competitive in the international steel market, officials said.
With the latest cutbacks, the company’s work force will be slightly more than a third the size it was as late as 1983, when Inland employed 28,000 people and the American steel industry was mired in what was described as a depression.
The closing of the plate operation and early retirement offers accepted by 280 salaried employees last June enabled Inland to exceed its goal announced in late 1991 to shrink the payroll by 3,500.
Inland in recent years made no secret that the plate operation ywould remain open only as long as it continued to produce a profit.
“We haven’t invested a lot of money in it,” said one company official. “We’ve always said we’d keep it going as long as it made money. It started losing money.”
However, the company declined to provide any financial data on the plate operation.
Its closing will not affect the parent company’s earnings because, Inland said, “termination benefits had been provided for previously.”
Inland won’t report third-quarter earnings until Oct. 16, but for the first half of 1995 the company posted a net income of $101.9 million, or $1.93 per share, on sales of $2.53 billion.
For all of 1994, Inland reported a $107.4 million profit, or $1.81 per share, on sales of $4.5 billion.