Report: Argentine Firm Bids for Sparrows Point Mill

Argentine steel-making giant Ternium has joined three other bidders seeking to buy the idled Sparrows Point mill, a Baltimore news website reports.

The Baltimore Brew, citing unnamed sources, reported the Ternium bid comes less than a month after Sparrows Point owner Severstal's announcement that it would extend idling of primary operations through March, leaving 800 union workers without jobs.

As the United Steelworkers Union presses Severstal to sell the facility by the end of the year, the company's CEO, Alexei Mordashov, isn't satisfied with the other three offers, the Brew's Mark Reutter reported.  Reutter has reported and written extensively on Sparrows Point and is the author of Making Steel: Sparrows Point and the Rise and Ruin of American Industrial Might.

Representatives of Mordashov, the Russian billionaire, have hinted he may keep Sparrows Point nearly idle until he gets higher bids or steel prices rebound, the Brew reported.

Ternium executives inspected the Baltimore mill this fall on the ground and in helicopter flyovers and told union leaders of plans to fire up the plant's steel-making furnaces to capacity, the Brew reported. That, in turn, could restore employment to hundreds of laid-off workers.

A Ternium representative told Dundalk Patch Wednesday the company does not comment on "market rumors" and he declined to comment on whether executives had toured the facility this fall.  Dundalk Patch's efforts to reach officials at Severstal were unsuccessful.

Read more at the Baltimore Brew.