OREANDA-NEWS. On 13 August 2008 was announced, that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin paid a working visit to United Metallurgical Company’s (OMK) entities located in the Vyksa District, Nizhni Novgorod Region: Vyksa Steel Works (VSW) and the Casting and Rolling Complex (CRC) . Mr. Putin was accompanied by Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, Russian Minister of Industry and Trade Viktor Khristenko, Plenipotentiary Presidential Envoy in the Volga Federal District Grigory Rapota, and Governor of the Nizhni Novgorod Region Valery Shantsev.

OMK’s Vyksa industrial site is the only location in Russia where simultaneously under construction are two large metallurgical facilities: CRC and Mill-5000. They will serve as a base for creating, in the Vyksa District, the largest metallurgical cluster, which will annually produce 3 million tonnes of pipes and 4.5 million tonnes of hot-rolled steel coils and wide-strip sheets manufactured according to state-of-the-art technologies.

Vladimir Putin visited the CRC Electric Furnace Shop. During the visit, Chairman of the OMK Board of Directors Anatoly Sedykh reported that CRC Phase 1, whose launch is scheduled for September 2008, will annually produce 1.5 million tonnes of high quality hot-rolled steel coils. After the launch of Phase 2, CRC’s total output will reach 3 million tonnes a year. CRC will be Russia's first facility to manufacture rolled products according to the most cost-efficient technology, using thin billets on the basis of continuous casting and rolling combined in a single technological process. The CRC products can be used in the pipe, automotive, shipbuilding and of the industries. The launch of Mill-5000 (capacity of 1.5 million tonnes of broad sheets a year), scheduled for 2010, will fully cover VSW’s needs for rolled products to produce large-diameter pipes (LDP).

While at VSW, Mr. Putin and his retinue inspected the LDP Electric Pipe-Welding Division (LDP EPWD) – the world's largest pipe production facility (annual capacity: 2 million tonnes) for long-distance oil and gas pipelines – in whose creation OMK invested USD 500 million. LDP EPWD’s products are supplied for the construction of subsea sections of the Nord Stream gas pipeline and other pipeline megaprojects.

The head of the Russian Government also visited the Wheel-Rolling Division (WRD), the world's largest facility for the production of solid railroad wheels. Every year, it manufactures more than 820,000 wheels for Russian Railways and foreign customers.