Raphael John-Lall

Min­is­ter of Trade and In­dus­try, Paula Gopee-Scoon has de­fend­ed the restart of Nu-Iron Un­lim­it­ed’s op­er­a­tions on Mon­day by say­ing the com­pa­ny is one of the coun­try’s im­por­tant ex­porters.

Gopee-Scoon who toured the Nu-Iron plant in Point Lisas in 2016 told the Guardian on Tues­day that Nu-Iron Un­lim­it­ed, which pro­duces in­puts for steel is a strate­gic man­u­fac­tur­er and every­thing it pro­duces is ex­port­ed to its par­ent com­pa­ny in the Unit­ed States.

She not­ed it was the Min­istry of Health that gave the fi­nal ap­proval for the restart of op­er­a­tions.

On Mon­day, CNC3 host Hema Ramkissoon, in an in­ter­view with Karen Nunez-Teshiera, a for­mer Fi­nance Min­is­ter, raised the ques­tion of why these com­pa­nies were al­lowed to re­open be­fore oth­er man­u­fac­tur­ers.

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley in his Sat­ur­day an­nounce­ment of a phased re­open­ing of the econ­o­my said that from Mon­day, Nu-Iron, Wit­co and Trinidad Ce­ment Ltd (TCL) would have been al­lowed to re­open.

The prime min­is­ter had ex­plained, “Be­cause of our po­si­tion in the in­ter­na­tion­al mar­ket place, we have tak­en the po­si­tion, the Min­is­ter has grant­ed the ap­proval for the to­bac­co ex­port busi­ness Wit­co to re­sume op­er­a­tions large­ly for ex­port. We have the ap­proval for TCL and Nu Iron. Those three busi­ness­es have been grant­ed ap­proval for start­up. For Nu-Iron, we have been run­ning with­out pro­duc­tion for the last two months. We think it is time that they go in­to pro­duc­tion.”

As­sum­ing that there is no ma­jor spike in COVID-19 cas­es, the rest of the man­u­fac­tur­ing in­dus­try will be al­lowed to re-open on May 24 dur­ing Phase Two of the re­open­ing.

Nu-Iron Un­lim­it­ed which be­gan op­er­a­tions in T&T in 2006 is a whol­ly-owned sub­sidiary of Nu­cor Cor­po­ra­tion based in Char­lotte, North Car­oli­na, Unit­ed States.

They are part of the steel­mak­ing in­dus­try and they pro­duce Di­rect Re­duced Iron (DRI) which is melt­ed and processed in­to steel. Nu-Iron Un­lim­it­ed is the largest ship­per of cold DRI in the world.

Nu­cor and af­fil­i­ates are man­u­fac­tur­ers of iron and steel prod­ucts and Nu­cor is North Amer­i­ca’s largest re­cy­cler.

For the first quar­ter of 2020, Nu­cor re­port­ed con­sol­i­dat­ed net earn­ings of US $20.3 mil­lion on sales of 5.62 mil­lion. How­ev­er, the re­port stat­ed that a loss in the sec­ond quar­ter of the fi­nan­cial year is like­ly.

“The glob­al cri­sis caused by the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic has touched the lives of al­most every­one in some way, and we would be re­miss not to ac­knowl­edge the phys­i­cal, men­tal and emo­tion­al toll so much of the world is ex­pe­ri­enc­ing,” said Leon Topalian, Nu­cor’s Pres­i­dent and Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer.

They com­ment­ed on their T&T op­er­a­tions in the Re­port, “In all these ju­ris­dic­tions, Nu­cor has been deemed an es­sen­tial or life-sus­tain­ing op­er­a­tion. Ac­cord­ing­ly, we are main­tain­ing pro­duc­tion op­er­a­tions suf­fi­cient to meet our cus­tomers’ on­go­ing needs.  Our di­rect re­duced iron (‘DRI’) fa­cil­i­ty in Trinidad stopped pro­duc­tion on March 30 to com­ply with the coun­try’s stay-at-home or­ders. Our DRI fa­cil­i­ty in Louisiana halt­ed pro­duc­tion on April 2 in re­sponse to mar­ket con­di­tions and out of con­cern for the health and safe­ty of our team­mates in an area of the coun­try that has ex­pe­ri­enced a par­tic­u­lar­ly ag­gres­sive out­break of COVID-19 cas­es.”

In 2018 it was re­port­ed that Nu-Iron Un­lim­it­ed had an in­ter­est in ac­quir­ing the now-de­funct Arcelor Mit­tal plant in Point Lisas, how­ev­er, an­oth­er group of com­pa­nies even­tu­al­ly won the bid.