Nowadays, our contemporary age leads us to think every day that the reality we are living is complex, difficult, able to change paradigms and to revolutionize the way of doing business radically. All talk about our world and the period we are living with alarming tones of concern. Certainly, Syrian facts, the Isis, the tensions between Russia and Ukraine, Syria with its atrocious internal conflicts, Hong Kong young people who rebel against the Chinese Government leave no room to think of living a peaceful period. Complying with this line, we are still trying to underline certain troubles in some lines of this article, such as for instance the Chinese one. In the first six months of 2014, subsidies to Chinese steel mills weighed by 80% of profits, decreasing margins to 0.3%, datum that confirms the structural problems of the sector. The domestic production is too high compared to the Country’s real requirements. They produce one billion tons, while in the first semester 2014 they consumed only 376 million tons and all that generates the declaration of default of Huaikuang Modern Logistic Co, one of the several intermediate companies in China, or the impossibility of paying debts by the State company Sinosteel. Across the world, USA adopt antidumping measures on the imports of oil country tubular goods, with serious repercussions for Countries like South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, Ukraine and Vietnam. Some of these Countries, unavoidably, have already lodged an appeal against these decisions and are just the expression of a complex global situation. Let us try, however, to go against the mainstream. Arcelor Mittal, the French-Indian steel giant has explicitly expressed the will of starting a purchase negotiation of the Italian company Ilva. This negotiation will be certainly long, also because its takeover implies not only buying sheds and plants but also the environmental rehabilitation, the maintenance of plants, union problems and much more. Do you think that a big iron and steel Group like Arcelor Mittal undertakes such a negotiation, without having a positive perspective vision of the future? How can we believe that another multinational decides to mark its presence in the appurtenance sector with investments amounting to two billion Euros, 300 scientists at work for 15 years and 600 new engagements, in a single Italian regional capital, who will produce dozens of plants (then worked, forged and shaped steel) for a consumer good that, besides, damages health. All this without having a medium-long term positive development of the industrial world? I do not think so. These big companies have the necessary instruments to interpret the world that surrounds us with its dynamics, and they see rosy. Perhaps, however, it is up to us to look at where they are focusing too, maybe we have just to think that today’s frantic world in its changes sees new Countries and new consumers as protagonists. Let us give then the best of our productive capacity to them. What do you think?
