Baltic Export, Latvia, Markets and Companies, Metals Market

As Severstallat board chairman Andrejs Aleksejevs admitted in an interview with the business portal Nozare.lv, last year the company operated with losses, which had been foreseen in advance and the majority of which had been planned and approved by shareholders in the middle of last summer.

Consumption in Severstallat's main markets, the Baltic States, decreased by more than two times in 2009. Demand for the main product lines in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia was 653,000 tons in 2007, 484,000 tons in 2008, but only 200,000 tons in 2009, writes LETA.

"The volume of production sold in Latvia in 2009 fell by 63% or 2.7 times. Earlier, we sold 22% of our total volume in Latvia, and now it is only 15%," indicated Aleksejevs.

Sales volumes in Lithuania and Estonia last year shrank by 70% and 66% respectively.

Exports of production also decreased significantly in 2009: to Finland by 32%, and to Sweden by 12%. Meanwhile, exports to Poland grew by 23%, and to Germany by 75%.

In 2008 Severstallat sold 29% of its production in Germany, Poland, Finland and Sweden, but in 2009 this figure reached 57%.