UrBC, Magnitogorsk, April 7, 2020. Starting this year, MMK Group’s MMK-METIZ will be celebrating its launch date on April 5 rather than October 1, the company’s Director Alexander Mukhin says.

‘Magnitogorsk’s first metal goods plant started operating in September 1941, when evacuated equipment from metal goods manufacturing plants arrived from six Soviet cities. The appliances were housed within two industrial sites, which then evolved into two plants: a metal goods/metallurgical one and a calibrating one. On April 5, 1942, People’s Commissar for Ferrous Metallurgy in the USSR I.F. Tevosyan signed an executive order to launch Magnitogorsk Metal Goods/Metallurgical Plant. On October 1, 1942, a state commission signed an acceptance act for Magnitogorsk Calibrating Plant to get commissioned,’ MMK’s Information & PR Department quotes Mukhin as saying.

According to Mukhin, the original order of events makes choosing April 5 (the day the launch act was signed in 1942) as the plant’s birthday more logical. There’s yet another important date in the history of the plant, however: on June 1, 2006, the two plants merged into a single enterprise now known as MMK-METIZ, with two production sites.