The anchor manufacturer: I/N Tek and I/N Kote — founding, peak form, and fate

1987–2020 · THE CORPORATE RECORD, THE TRADE PRESS AND THE SEC FILING

The largest industry this town ever held was announced in March 1987, and it was a partnership between Chicago steel and Japan. Inland Steel Industries and Nippon Steel Corporation — then the world's largest steel producer — announced I/N Tek, a joint-venture continuous cold-rolling mill on a greenfield site at the town's eastern edge, its technology patterned on Nippon's Hirohata pilot plant and billed by company officials as the world's most advanced cold-rolled finishing mill (the superlative is tested as a claim in the claims addendum). Site selection had begun in 1984; the partners chose the rural site deliberately, at a distance from the lakefront works. Commercial production began in March 1990: a mill that combined five formerly separate operations into one continuous process, finishing in under an hour steel that had taken twelve days at the Harbor Works, at a rated 1.5 million tons. Before Tek was complete the partners announced the second venture — I/N Kote, a $450 million galvanizing plant adjacent, with electrogalvanizing and hot-dip lines of 900,000 tons a year combined, in operation by the end of 1991; together the two plants stood at nearly one billion 1990 dollars. Fate, in the corporate sense, came in stages: Inland was acquired by Ispat International in July 1998, passed through Mittal Steel to ArcelorMittal, and on 9 December 2020 Cleveland-Cliffs completed its acquisition of ArcelorMittal USA — taking its 60 percent of I/N Tek and 50 percent of I/N Kote and, in the same closing, buying Nippon Steel's remaining 40 and 50 percent for some $183 million, becoming sole owner of both plants. The ventures survive under new names — Cleveland-Cliffs Tek L.P. and Cleveland-Cliffs Kote L.P. — and the pair generated $121 million of adjusted earnings in 2019, the last full year of the joint venture. The mills were never inside the town's boundary — they stand just east of it, in the township — and the town's relation to them is the relation of this whole build: the workforce, the tax ground and the skyline are the township's; the plants' own seats belong to the steel record. The district's other great industrial ground, the Bendix proving ground with its woods, rides at pointer in the recreation file, its seat outside this section as banked.

Sources:

1. "I/N Tek rolls," Indiana business press, 1990 (thefreelibrary.com) — the March 1987 announcement, the 1984 site search, production from March 1990, the Kote announcement and its 1991 target and capacity.
2. Inland Steel Company, corporate history (the Ispat acquisition of July 1998; the successor line Ispat-Inland → Mittal → ArcelorMittal → Cleveland-Cliffs 2020).
3. Cleveland-Cliffs Inc., news release, 9 December 2020 (SEC filing, sec.gov) — the acquisition whole: the 60/50 interests, the Nippon buyout at ~$183 million, sole ownership, the 2019 earnings figure; the 2020 annual report for the Tek L.P. / Kote L.P. renamings.
4. Architecture, "The modern layer" — I/N Tek 1990 / I/N Kote 1991 at closing size; this history — the Bendix proving-ground pointer.