preferred buyer for the steelmaker which collapsed in May. Ataer now has exclusive rights to look into
British Steel in greater detail and plans to complete the purchase by the end of the year.
Toker Ozcan, head of the mining metallurgy group at Oyak, told the FT that the group’s immediate focus
will be to boost output. He declined to comment on the scale of possible job losses but said productivity at
British Steel’s main plant in Scunthorpe is “very low” compared with other European steel producers.
“I am not focused on headcount but on productivity,” he said. “We will take productivity to where it needs
to be.”
The plans could result in several hundred job cuts, according to two people with knowledge of the talks
quoted by the FT.
British Steel employs around 5,000 people, most of them in the UK. More than 3,000 work at its
Scunthorpe plant. Oyak could not be reached for comment.
The FT also reported that Ataer is in talks with the UK government about a “financial contribution” to help
make British Steel’s plants greener, by converting them to run on hydrogen. First, the plants will need to
switch from coal to gas, Mr Ozcan was quoted as saying.
“We would like to convert at least 50 per cent of the capacity to gas-based steel,” he said. Then, he added,
“with the efforts of the UK government, we want to convert from gas to hydrogen”.
He said: “Our ambition is to go from carbon to lower-carbon to zero. We will be leading the way to produce
clean steel.”
A spokesperson for the UK’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy declined to
comment, saying these are “commercially sensitive” discussions.
The UK has pledged to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050 but its actions are lagging far behind what
is needed to meet that target, according to a recent report to by the Committee on Climate Change, made
up of independent advisers to the government.