Duferdofin-Nucor and Trenitalia Cargo Division of the Ferrovie dello Stato Group, have recently signed a five year contract for the handling of rail freight services. We asked Domenico Campanella, the company’s CEO, to explain the meaning of this agreement.
I’ll start by briefly explaining the road our Company has embarked upon and its positioning in Italy. Duferdofin-Nucor was born from a joint venture between Duferco Group and Nucor Corporation for the manufacturing in Italy of beams and long products, and for its distribution inland and Europe and to the Mediterranean Basin. The Company’s headquarters in San Zeno Naviglio, near Brescia, is the benchmark of the Group also comprised of San Zeno Acciai-Duferco SpA, Acofer Prodotti Siderurgici Srl, Sidervaldarno SpA e Travi e Profilati di Pallanzeno SpA. The Group is the Italian leader in the construction beam market and one of the main companies in Europe. Duferdofin-Nucor, with its 800 employees, has a productive capacity of 800.000 tons of steel and 1 million tons of beams per year.
The steel market has always favored the use of the rail system to transport its products. Or are there other reasons for you choosing train over other means of transport?
In order to tackle the difficulty arising from the distance between production sites, Duferdofin-Nucor has created a specific logistics organization which operates primarily, thanks also to the tested collaboration with Trenitalia’s Cargo Division, with freight rail services. Especially with traffic between our plants in San Zeno and in Giammoro, in the Messina province, which are almost 1300 km apart.
How is the production cycle structured?
In the San Zeno steel plant Duferdofin-Nucor produces blooms and billets, semi-finished products for rolling mills. The products are then loaded onto freight wagons and sent to the rolling mills in Giammoro and Pallanzeno to be transformed into beams. In the next phase most of the finished products return from Giammoro to San Zeno by train to then be sold in the domestic and international markets while the beams produced in Pallanzeno are distributed directly to the market. Part of the beam distribution and purchase of raw materials, such as scrap and pig iron, are all transported by train.
Where does Trenitalia Cargo’s service offer come into your logistic chain?
In this production flow Trenitalia Cargo offers a vast number of resources in order to guarantee the perfect execution of transport, and move almost 500.000 tons each year to and from San Zeno with daily trains connecting the two plants, with a capacity of 1600 gross tons per trip. The connections between San Zeno and Pallanzeno can move up to 300.000 tons each year and the distribution flows from the production plants to other Italian and European destinations amount to almost another 200.000 tons per year. It is significant that in 2008 the volume transported by Trenitalia Cargo for the Duferdofin-Nucor Group was over 1 billion ton/km of steel with a 19% increase from the previous year.
A constant stream of goods on the long railway connection between your plants in Italy. Far away from road traffic, distances seem reduced.
Undoubtedly. And, if there are no criticalities, the impact on the regular production and on order promises is evident. Behind the reliability and the safety of rail transport there is another aspect that needs to be underlined: the Group’s commitment towards environmental policies, and the agreement that we recently undersigned with Trenitalia represents a further contribution towards environmental protection and sustainable progress.
Moving 1 million tons of steel by train instead of truck implies a reduction of almost 160.000 tons of CO2 emissions in the next five years. But also this agreement reinforces an already strong partnership with Trenitalia Cargo and represents, during a difficult economic moment for freight rail transport, a positive step towards the re-launch of the sector.
