Global Fastener News

By Dick Callahan

May 30, 1984 FIN – Hamilton, Ontario-based Stelco, Inc., Canada’s largest steel producer has reorganized its fastener manufacturing and marketing activities.

Stelco processes about 36% of all steel made in Canada.

The company recently established a new group called the Stelco Fastener & Forging Company which will manufacture and market fasteners and forgings produced and warehoused at Swansea, Gananoque and Brantford Works, the Canada Works East Mill and the Fastener Shipping Centre in Burlington.

This new set up is the result of an in-depth study of the strategic business unit concept in which certain facilities are grouped together, staffed with an organization that concentrates on the production and marketing of a limited product line, and where performance is measured by return on capital employed or return on net assets. From this study has evolved the Stelco Fastener and Forging Company and another group, the Stelco Wire Products Co.

The Stelco Fastener & Forging Company has its administration headquarters at the Fastener Shipping Center in Burlington and general manager is D.B. (Doc) Morrow, who was formerly general superintendent, Fastener & Forging Operations. About 50 people were moved to this location from Stelco’s corporate headquarters in the Toronto Dominion Centre in Toronto.

Morrow, in explaining the role of the new organization, describes it as being “actually in the automotive parts business because that’s our main thrust in life.”

A large percentage of the fastener which the new company produces go to the automotive business and about 70 percent of production from the Ganaoque forging plant goes into autos as well, explaining why it was consolidated with the fastener group. By the same token The Notre Dame Works in Montreal was not made part of the new fastener company because its products are mostly rockbolts for mines and bolts for heavy industry. The same is true for the Edmonton Finishing Works because its products are mainly sucker rods for oilfields.

The newly established Wire Product Company, headquartered in Toronto, will also have its own roles to play in the fastener field, namely in the sale of cold heading quality wire. In recent months Stelco has aggressively begun to compete for this business against the Japanese in places like Chicago. According to Peter Predinger, general manager of the Stelco Wire Products Company, “The American lost that business recently to the Japanese. Then we took a look at the market. The sales people worked away at getting orders and the operators did a fantastic job of making the products. And before the Japanese knew it, we were competing there successfully.”

Stelco has a new chief executive officer, John D. Allen, who succeeds J. Peter Gordon in that post. Gordon will continue as chairman and Allan will now be president and CEO.

Stelco incidentally, has turned things around nicely in recent months. For the first quarter the company showed net income of $7.7 million on sales of around $600 million compared with a loss of $36.7 million on sales of $472 million for the same quarter last year.  ©1994/2010 Fastener Industry News