Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (MMK) raises its domestic market output on a yearly basis, as this is the home market that the company’s top managers think of as their top priority and strategically important one.

The home market sales (including the delivery of metal goods to Byelorussia) have been dealt with by the Domestic Sales Administration for over ten years now. The Administration now runs several projects, streamlined along regional sales, branch sales, sales to car factories and to natural monopolies, sales of metal goods with coatings and of tin plate, and short-term planning.

The enterprise managed to raise the share of its domestic market export in the total production output from 39.5% to 58.5% over the course of a decade. 2.7 million tons of rolled metal were supplied onto the home market in 1998; the home sales exceeded the foreign export for the first time in 2005, while a year later these came to over 6 million tons, or 54% of the company’s total sales. In 2007, MMK’s Russian customers received more than 7.3 million tons of metal goods, which exceeded the figures for a year earlier by 1.25 million tons, or 21%. The better part of the produce was shipped to the Urals (23.1%), the Volga Region (12.7%), and Central Region (7.4%).

MMK’s key domestic customers are enterprises dealing in metal goods processing, like pipe factories and machine-building plants as well as builders and car factories. MMK shipped 4.9 million tons of goods to its home contractors in January-August 2008 and expects to deliver more than 8 million tons of metal products onto the home market by the end of the year. Provided the enterprise’s output increases up to 15 million tons in 2013, up to 12 million tons will be sold on the domestic market, the spokesperson for Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works says.