STEEL will only retain its markets if it offers a cost competitive service to manufacturers, the International Iron Steel Institute's annual meeting was told by two steel consumers. "You can rely on us being your customer precisely as long as you can provide better value for money than your competitors," said Niels Roed, senior vp of purchasing at the Odense Steel Shipyard in Denmark. Another user, Wolfram Wacker of the German white goods producer Bosch-Siemens, said coaled steel appears to have a rosy future, provided it proves possible to meet quality requirements, optimise technical properties of the material, and to offer competitive prices. But Wacker said coated sheet is too expensive: "There is no reason why the costs of coil-coated materials should be so high," he said. Most coil-coating lines operating today are "hopelessly over-dimensioned", he said, adding: "There is literally nothing that their owners do not expect them to be able to do."
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