Creusot-Loire was a French engineering conglomerate, formed from factories in

Le Creusot Le Creusot () is a commune and industrial town in the Saône-et-Loire department, region of Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, eastern France. The inhabitants are known as Creusotins. Formerly a mining town, its economy is now dominated by metallurgic ...

and Châteauneuf, Loire. The Creusot-Loire subsidiary of

ArcelorMittal ArcelorMittal S.A. is a Luxembourgian multinational steel manufacturing corporation headquartered in Luxembourg City. It was formed in 2006 from the takeover and merger of Arcelor by Indian-owned Mittal Steel. ArcelorMittal is the second la ...

also includes an Innovation, Research and Development centre for the group.

History

The group was formed in 1970 as a result of Compagnie des ateliers et forges de la Loire (owned by Marine-Firminy) and (owned by Schneider) merger. The Société des Forges et Ateliers du Creusot had absorbed the Société métallurgique d'Imphy in 1968. The enterprise developed what has become known as the Creusot-Loire Uddeholm (CLU) converter process, which was developed to minimize the need of argon, and which was first erected on an industrial scale in the 1970s at

Degerfors Degerfors () is a locality and the seat of Degerfors Municipality, Örebro County, Sweden, with 7,160 inhabitants in 2010. Degerfors is the sixth-largest city in Örebro County. It is located at the southern shore of lake Möckeln, 13 km (8 mi) s ...

. The group was affected by the 1970s

steel crisis The steel crisis was a recession in the global steel market during the 1973–75 recession and early 1980s recession following the post–World War II economic expansion and the 1973 oil crisis, further compounded by the 1979 oil crisis, and ...

, and was not able to pay a

dividend A dividend is a distribution of profits by a corporation to its shareholders. When a corporation earns a profit or surplus, it is able to pay a portion of the profit as a dividend to shareholders. Any amount not distributed is taken to be re-i ...

after 1977. In 1984 the organisation became bankrupt with debts of $633 million; the company's owner Empain-Schneider rejected state aid as the conditions included giving away control of another subsidiary Jeumont Industrie. At some point near 2000, Imphy SA owned the

Invar Invar, also known generically as FeNi36 (64FeNi in the US), is a nickel–iron alloy notable for its uniquely low coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE or α). The name ''Invar'' comes from the word ''invariable'', referring to its relative lac ...

trademark. At some point, the organization may have been part of

Usinor Usinor was a French steel making group formed in 1948. The group was merged with Sacilor in 1986, becoming Usinor-Sacilor and was privatised in 1995, and renamed Usinor in 1997. In 2001 it merged with Arbed (Luxembourg) and Aceralia (Spain) to for ...

, which became in the 2001/2 restructuring the company known as

Arcelor Arcelor S.A. was the world's largest steel producer in terms of turnover and the second largest in terms of steel output, with a turnover of €30.2 billion and shipments of 45 million metric tons of steel in 2004. The company was created in 2002 ...

. Before September 2003, the organisation had been renamed Industeel and absorbed by

. In September 2015, Industeel was touting its homogeneous armour products and its ballistic protection steel plates. It boasted that 5mm of its MARS 600 product could stop a NATO 7.62mm round at a distance of 10m. By February 2018, the organization had been rebaptized Industeel France and was then owned by

. The French arm had been augmented by Industeel Belgium, which operated with 1200 employees in Charleroi. In November 2020, ArcelorMittal had decided to sell the unit.

References

Sources

* * Steel companies of France Engineering companies of France {{France-company-stub