‘The economic crisis has left VIZ-Stal (as well as most metallurgical enterprises) with the plummeting demand for its produce. The drop was particularly felt in the first quarter of the year,’ says the company’s Deputy GD Sergey Makurov.

‘Our action plan provides for decreasing all the non-manufacturing costs and making our production process more efficient. Then, we are still trying to reach the optimal staff balance (as we have been doing since 2007, in fact). This actually means 2,271 to 2,200 people will probably have been made redundant by July 1, 2009. No more workers will be fired because of the crisis, however,’ he adds.

‘Given the actual amount of orders we have at the moment, VIZ-Stal is going to change the working hours a bit. For one, our cold rolling shop had to be halted in February, with some of the personnel sent on forced leaves (they still get two-thirds of their pay, though). Some of the shop’s workers are employed for repairs and ancillary jobs. Nevertheless, our April order portfolio looks like the shop will resume the business as usual as soon as March 2009. Then, we expect our production output to start gradually going up again in the second quarter of the year,’ Makurov notes.