The current owner of Sparrows Point is a rapidly growing multinational steel giant controlled by one of the world's richest men.
Sparrows Point's new owner will be a rapidly growing multinational steel giant controlled by one of the world's richest men.
But there are some key differences.
Seller ArcelorMittal is controlled by the world's fourth-richest man, Lakshmi N. Mittal, according to Forbes magazine, which this month estimated his net worth at $45 billion. Mittal was already a billionaire when he began buying up steel companies, and the behemoth he's assembled is the world's biggest steelmaker.
The new owner is OAO Severstal, formed in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse. And the man who oversaw its growth, Alexei Mordashov, became the 18th-richest man in the world according to Forbes, with a net worth pegged at $21.2 billion - up from 54th in a single year.
Mordashov was born in 1965 in the steel town of Cherepovets, on the Volga River about 250 miles north of Moscow and roughly the same distance east of St. Petersburg. (Severstal means "Northern Steel" in Russian.) Cherepovets is sort of a Russian version of Gary, Ind., or Bethlehem, Pa., during the heyday of American steel - a moderate-sized city dominated by a steel mill.
The mill, now run by Severstal, employs 36,000 people in a city of 300,000, according to Gregory Mason, Severstal's chief operating officer, who calls it "basically ... a company town."
Mordashov's parents both worked in the mill, and when he completed studies in industrial economics at Leningrad Institute of Economics and Engineering, he came home to the mill in 1988 as a cost controller, according to Mason and a company history.
In 1992, he became chief financial officer. And in 1993, as the Soviet Union broke up, the steelmaker was among the state-owned industries that were privatized. Just a few years later, Mordashov became chief executive at age 31.
Through what was described in a BBC profile as "quick-footed and complicated financial deals," he managed to claim ownership of most of Severstal. According to Severstal, Mordashov owns 82 percent of the company's shares. "We never seized anything, we never twisted anyone's arm, we never used state organs or corruption," Mordashov told Forbes.
Over the same period, Lakshmi Mittal was busy turning his family's steel business, which originated in India, into an international Goliath and Severstal rival.
