UrBC, Chelyabinsk, August 17, 2010. Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (MMK) and OAO Chelyabinsk Tube Rolling Plant (ChTPZ) signed an agreement on scientific and technical cooperation. The partnership project presumes that both companies’ engineers will coordinate their efforts in the field of new tubing products design. The tubes are to be manufactured in ChTPZ Vysota 239 department shop. Besides, the engineers will work on new alloys and materials with pre-programmed mechanical properties for MMK Mill 5000. Both MMK and ChTPZ are also planning to work together with a number of leading Russian and foreign science and research institutes, ChTPZ press service reports.
‘The new agreement will ensure better understanding of our production processes and of the requirements our rolled stock has to meet in order to be suitable for main pipelines; it also means we can improve our quality in advance,’ MMK Executive Director Yuri Bodyaev said when signing the agreement.
‘We are positive that the intense cooperation of our engineers and scientists will result in the more frequent market launches of new products and the ongoing improvements in the quality of tubes and pipes,’ said ChTPZ Technical Policy & Investment Director Sergey Chikalov.
Launched in July 2009, Mill 5000 is to become the major metal supplier for Vysota 239 LDP shop. The strategic cooperation agreement, valid through the year 2015, was signed by MMK BOD Chairman Viktor Rashnikov and ChTPZ General Director Alexander Fedorov on July 23, 2010, the day Vysota 239 was launched in Chelyabinsk.