In selling a complete steel mill to China in the autumn of 2001, Thyssen Mannesmann Handel closed the world’s biggest used plant deal of its kind. The buyer, the Jiangsu Shagang Group, is China’s foremost private-sector steelmaker.

Included in the sale were the sintering plant, two blast furnaces, the oxygen steel and the hot wide strip mills. The shipment comprised 250,000 tonnes of freight and some 40 tonnes of documentation necessary to rebuild the complex 1:1 at its new home. The first of the blast furnaces came on stream at the start of this year.

In handling this extraordinary project, the Thyssen Mannesmann Handel team made sure that everything went smoothly—from conception to completion which also involved the supervision of the disassembly work carried out by 800 Chinese workers and the compilation of the detailed documentation.