OREANDA-NEWS. On April 05, 2007 Mechel OAO (NYSE: MTL), one of the leading vertically-integrated mining and metals companies, announced its operational results for the first quarter of 2007, reported the press-centre of  Mechel.

Alexey Ivanushkin, Mechel’s Chief Operating Officer, commented: “The first quarter of 2007 witnessed growth in both of our segments – mining and steel production. Coal production output growth was mainly due to an increase in the production of steam coal, which exceeded production of coking coal in our South Kuzbass plant for the first time in history. We also continued to scale up our production of nickel given the unprecedented growth in prices for nonferrous metals. During the quarter, the price of nickel exceeded $50,000 per tonne. In the steel segment, positive results were largely due to the company’s progress in increasing the share of concasted steel while reducing costs by decreasing the amount of materials consumed in flat steel production. We recently commissioned two concasters at our Chelyabinsk metallurgical plant and our Romanian plant, Mechel Targoviste. We also continued to increase production output of higher-value end products such as long and flat products as well as hardware, while reducing the production of semi-finished products. In stampings production, we concentrated on the production from high-end quality steel, which brought about a slight decrease in production volumes of plain stampings. To achieve this production, we increased output of specialty steel forgings at our Chelyabinsk metallurgical plant. The sharp increase in coke production was achieved due to the acquisition of the Moscow Coke and Gas plant, as well as the commissioning of a new coking battery at our Chelyabinsk metallurgical plant last year.