ROMAN PIPES

closed

The project would consist of a Pilger mill with a capacity of about 130,000 tpy of large diameter seamless wall pipe. It would produce about 100 different types of large diameter pipes to meet increasing domestic and international demand for these products, and to save and earn foreign exchange. Pipes produced under the project would find a wide range of applications across Romanian industry including oil and gas exploration, production and transportation, chemicals, boiler, machine tool and earth moving equipment manufacture, ship building, and marine platform manufacture. The transfer of the Pilger mill technology will be a benefit to the Romanian pipe industry. About 900 new jobs will be created, and net foreign exchange benefits are estimated at $74 million annually at full production. The market and commercial risks arising from uncertainty of export market and export prices for the project products are not considered major since COMECON countries and China could absorb project output if the expected market opportunities were not fully realized. The technical risk that steel ingots of required quality would temporarily not be produced in Romania would be minimized by training and provision of technical assistance.