Wire and Plastic Machinery Corporation reports that it has been chosen by The Marmon Group to liquidate the assets of the closed Aetna Insulated Wire plant in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

A press release said that some inventory highlights include: three Davis Standard CCV lines; four Davis Standard extrusion lines, three Bartell BX-armoring lines, two planetary cablers, two rigid stranders, a Haefely Trench 1000 KVA Hi Voltage tester and a 13-die Bekaert rod breakdown line. An assortment of test equipment, payoffs, take-ups, curing ovens, rewind lines and reels is also available.

All equipment is being sold "as is, where is." WPMC will make arrangements as needed for onsite viewing of all equipment. For more details, e-mail This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or call the company at tel. 860-583-4646.

Reliance Communications (RCom) announced plans to lay a 68,000-km undersea cable, estimated to cost $600 million, to carry data across Europe and Asia. 

Per multiple media reports, the system, which will connect its base in India with Italy to the West and Hong Kong on the East, is expected to treble the revenues in five years for its wholly-owned subsidiary Global Cloud Exchange, which is laying the cable. The cable, projected to be operational by the third quarter of 2020, will have  revenue potential of $1 billion per year, RCom Chief Executive Bill Barney told reporters.

The new cable, which was described as being able to reach more than “75% cent of the youth in the globe,”  will increase RCom’s capacity tenfold. The financing will come from partners, which at this point number six, including Alibaba, that account for $300 million. The investor fold could increase to as many as 30. Barney said that RCom expects to get over $700 million through such pre-sales as against the cost of $600 million.

The reports that RCom, saddled by debt, has struggled in recent years, recently exited its consumer-facing wireless business to focus on the enterprise segment.

Barney said the company expects a spurt in IT and telecom activity in the country over the next five to ten years, due to which it is betting on the cable business.

The WAI Operations Summit & Wire Expo 2018 event website is now live! Please visit wireexpo18.com for details about convention activities, the event schedule, speakers, workshops, sessions, exhibit descriptions, registration, and lodging information. At this event you will meet influential peers, thought leaders, and wire and cable industry colleagues who are ready to share practical insight about manufacturing.

The organizers of Fastener Fair Mexico announced that the event, held three times in Mexico City, will move this year to Guadalajara "to better serve the Mexican marketplace in need of industrial fastener and fixing solutions."

A press release from Mack Brooks Exhibitions, Inc., said that the 2018 event will be hosted June 20-21 at the Expo Guadalajara. "We produce Fastener Fair in seven countries and this will be the first time we bring this event to Guadalajara, a city full of opportunities," said Mack Brooks Executive Vice President Melissa Magestro. "We are expecting to attract over 2000 industrial fastener buyers, engineers and distributors. It is a great opportunity to connect with fastener buyers and distributors at Latin America’s only dedicated industrial fastener exhibition."

The event also includes an educational component. Fastener Fair Mexico 2017 hosted a technology conference that was well received, the release said. The rooms had good attendance for education and training for the fastener supply chain that addressed end users, distributors and wholesalers.

Per the release, Expo Guadalajara is the largest exhibition venue in all of Mexico. Guadalajara is the capital and most populous city of the State of Jalisco; it is the second largest urban area in Mexico and the 10th largest in Latin America with more than five million inhabitants. Classed as a gamma city since 2010, it is one of the 120 most competitive cities in the world.

The release said that Fastener Fair Mexico 2017 was attended by over 2,225 attendees from Mexican manufacturing industries that included automotive, aerospace, construction, mechanical and consumer electronics along with fastener distributors and wholesalers.

The second Fastener Fair Italy will be held in Milan on Sept. 26-27; the third Fastener Fair Turkey will take place in 2018; Fastener Fair will be held in Cleveland, Ohio, in the U.S. for the first time on April 11-12, 2018; and in Jakarta, Indonesia, on March 7-9.

For more information, go to www.fastenerfair.com.

ArcelorMittal has finalized the sale of Georgetown Steel to U.K.-based Liberty House, which announced plans to reopen the mill and resume production this spring.

A press release said that Liberty House—which is part of the GFG Alliance, a global metals, industrials and energy group owned by the British Gupta family—plans to re-hire 125 former employees and gradually increase the workforce to 250. The group is targeting a major share of the U.S. market for home-produced wire rod, demand for which is projected to grow substantially during 2018.

Of note, the release said that the purchase was "the first in a series of strategic North American acquisitions and new projects targeted by the group founded and run by British industrialist, Sanjeev Gupta." The company is already in discussions regarding the acquisition of other major U.S. steel assets and new greenfield projects, which it expects to announce this year.

Georgetown Steel, based in Georgetown, South Carolina. has a storied history. Founded in 1969 by German industrialist Willy Korf, it one time had as many as 1,500 employees. It had multiple owners, including the government of Kuwait in 1984 and the International Steel Group in 2004. It was bought in 2005 by Lakshmi Mittal. The mill closed in 2009, and following the Mittal merger with Arcelor, it was reopened by Arcelor Mittal in 2011, only to be closed in May 2015.

The 600,000-sq-ft plant, which has wire rod capacity of 680,000 metric tons, will resume serving the construction and automotive markets. The release said that the plan is to re-start melting and rolling this spring "as the first step in GFG’s ambitious investment plans for the American steel industry."

"Securing the Georgetown furnace and mill is a major milestone for us, marking our first major step in the USA," said Sanjeev Gupta, executive chairman of the GFG Alliance. "The melting and rolling facilities here give us a formidable entry to the American market and provide a strong platform for expansion. We see major prospects for the metals industry here." He added that the company plans to employ its GREENSTEEL sustainable strategy that it already uses in the U.K. and Australia.

Gupta said that customers have been in contact, and that "we’re keen to get back up and running as quickly as possible." He added that support from the town council, the state government and the union was important in making the deal work. "We look forward to rebuilding the business and bringing quality industrial employment back to the site and to the local and regional supply chain."

John Brett, president and CEO of ArcelorMittal USA, said that the goal throughout the process has been to maintain the Georgetown steelmaking operation. "While bittersweet for ArcelorMittal, we are hopeful that today’s announcement is a celebration for Liberty Steel and GFG Alliance, the United Steelworkers and the Georgetown community. We appreciate the patience of all of our stakeholders while we finalized this important transaction."

In a report in the SouthStrandNews, Gupta compared the Georgetown mill to Liberty House’s first steel plant in Newport, South Wales. "The first mill in the U.K. will always be important to us. ... That is where our British journey started," he said. "It was a shutdown plant as well," he added. "And we restarted it, and it’s a great success now. And that led to everything else we’ve done in the U.K. So Georgetown is the foundation of what we will do in the U.S."

At its website, Liberty Steel notes that has seven specialist businesses manufacturing steel products such as ingots, billets, blooms, slabs, bars and narrow strip, as well as hot rolled coil, pipes and tubes, structural hollow sections, plates, de-bar, wire, rod and more.