FOUNDED in 1958, the Handan Iron and Steel Group Co., Ltd., (HISG) is a large-scale iron and steel enterprise. It has an annual production capacity of 5 million tons of steel, and 4.5 million tons of rolled steel, 250 tons of which are steel slabs.

Since 1991, HISG has established and consistently improved its system of market economic calculation and cost analysis. It has upgraded traditional industries through new- and hi-technologies, and made remarkable achievements. The State Council has consequently made it a model enterprise. From 1991 to 1998 HISG invested a total of 4.4 billion yuan in the renovation of its iron-smelting, steel-smelting and steel-rolling systems. As a result, beneficiated burden materials are guaranteed to go into furnace, and blowing coal powder is used in all iron smelting. These renovations have also lead to sequence casting, refinery and tandem rolling.

Since 1998 HISG has invested 6.6 billion yuan in building five large-scale modern projects that would normally require a total of 10 billion yuan. The CSP project employs the German Siemag company's technologies to produce hot rolled plates. It began to generate profits three months after it commenced operations, and increased its monthly output to 100,000 tons within nine months. The president of Siemag has been quoted as saying that HISG's CSP has set four world records in building similar projects: the shortest construction period, the smallest investment, the soonest to reach expected output, and the lowest steel leakage rate.

HISG has, in addition, built a conversion plant with an annual output of 3 million tons that provides high quality molten steel to the CSP, a 2,000-cubic-meter blast furnace, two modern 6-meter ferric blast furnaces, and a 400-square-meter sintering machine. Outdated equipment has been or is in the process of being phased out, and as a result the overall technical level of HISG has improved, and the product structure greatly optimized. By 2000 its steel slabs had reached 52 percent.

In 2000 the HISG sales income hit 9 billion yuan, and profits amounted to 540 million yuan -- a substantial increase on the respective 1.02 billion and 1 million yuan of 1990. Since 1994 HISG has remained one of the top three metallurgical enterprises in China in terms of profits, and its gross and net assets have respectively grown from 2.2 billion yuan to 21.7 billion yuan, and 580 million yuan to 10.2 billion yuan.

Targeting on "high speed, high efficiency, high quality and high returns," HISG is making itself a high-quality steel slab base, featuring modern technology, large-scale equipment, optimized product structure, diversified operations and high competitiveness.