The World Comes to the Iron Range

But the foreign owner with the biggest stake in working mines on the Mesabi Range is ArcelorMittal, the largest steel company in the world. ArcelorMittal owns 100 percent of the four Minorca pits and nearly three-fourths of Hibbing Taconite. (Cleveland-Cliffs and U.S. Steel own the rest of Hibbing Taconite. U.S. Steel, the only U.S.-based steel company with an interest in Iron Range mining, recently announced that it would also boost production at its taconite plant in Keewatin.)

The story of ArcelorMittal’s involvement in the Iron Range begins with that of Lakshmi Mittal, the fifth-richest person in the world according to Forbes. Mittal grew up in India in a steel-producing family. When he became a top executive in the business, he set a goal of producing 100 million metric tons of steel a year. (A metric ton is a measure close to a long ton.) In 1994, he took over the international branch of the family business and bought steel mills across the globe. In 1998, his company, Ispat International, purchased Chicago-based Inland Steel, the owner of the Minorca mines. This gave Mittal his first foothold in Minnesota’s Iron Range.

Five years later, Bethlehem Steel filed for bankruptcy. The once-mighty U.S. steel maker had been the majority owner in Hibbing Taconite since its founding in 1976. Enter investor Wilbur Ross, noted for acquiring bankrupt companies in troubled industries, reviving them, and then selling them off. Ross had recently formed Integrated Steel Group (ISG) as a vehicle for purchasing troubled or bankrupt steel companies. Among those ISG picked up were such old names as Weirton, Acme, LTV (itself an amalgam of old U.S. steel makers Republic and Jones and Laughlin), and, in 2003, Bethlehem. Two years later, Ross sold ISG to Mittal, who thus received a majority ownership in Hibbing Taconite.

By buying ISG, Mittal became the largest steel producer in the world, with 63 million metric tons of production in 2005. The following year, Mittal purchased his largest competitor, Netherlands-based Arcelor, with 46.7 million metric tons of production. Production of the resulting company, ArcelorMittal, surpassed Mittal’s early goal by hitting 117.2 million metric tons in 2006.

ArcelorMittal now ships most of the pellets from both its Minorca operation and Hibbing Taconite to its plants in Indiana, which sell steel to the automotive, appliance, construction, and housing industries. ArcelorMittal also has other steel plants to feed. Last year, several boats left the ore docks in Superior, Wisconsin, bound for Algeria, with about 200,000 long tons of taconite. They were the first of Hibbing Taconite’s pellets to leave North America.