Discover the World of KMR Group

Company objectives

The chrome nickel branch in secondary raw materials provides the stainless steel producers world wide with raw materials necessary for their stainless steel production. For this purpose secondary raw materials, i.e. scrap is taken as a 100% substitute, along with primary raw materials extracted from ore, and used as a base raw material in stainless steel production.

Value Added

The value added is derived from the following functions:

• Analytical quality control and warranty
• Bulk packaging
• Financing
• Risk management of raw material prices and foreign exchange fluctuations

Secondary raw material chrome-nickel steel scrap

The secondary raw material Cr-Ni-Scrap is the most sought-after raw material for the production of austenitic steels. It holds a significant price advantage over primary raw materials and needs much less energy to smelt.
Stainless steel producers therefore try to use a high percentage of scrap in their production – some producers nowadays use scrap almost exclusively.
The average percentage of scrap used in the stainless steel industry is approx. 50%, i.e. for every ton of stainless steel produced about 500 kg is made from secondary raw material.

Association to Stainless Steel production

The market for chrome-nickel scrap is interdependent with the growth of stainless steel production. 5-10% are immediately available in the form of production wastes. Every remaining ton of stainless steel produced comes back into new production as a secondary raw material with a time lag of about 8-10 years via the recycling circuit. Based on past production figures there is therefore a so called scrap reserve which is successively available to the market as raw material. The world wide scrap reserve in 2005 is approx. 100 million tons. Since stainless steel production has risen between 1995 and 2005 at the average rate of 5-6%, the scrap reserve and therefore the market for Cr-Ni scrap has steadily risen. All analysts take the view this trend will continue for the future. This is enhanced by the material of stainless steel being so attractive, and also the backlog in demand of the emerging markets, especially that of China and India. As scrap can be neither produced nor mined, as is the case in primary raw materials, it is a question of the distribution of the raw material scrap.