The self-proclaimed largest re-roller of commercial steel profiles in Mexico, Vilsa, with the support of its commercial arm Thanos Steel, expects to increase production volume by at least 15 percent this year compared to 2023, the CEO of Thanos Steel, David Villanueva, told SteelOrbis.
Vilsa is the trademark of the Industrial de Acero company. Vilsa, a producer of commercial profiles based on scrap re-rolling, manufactured between 3,000 and 4,000 metric tons (mt) monthly and this year, the forecast is for an increase of 15.0 percent.
Although, as Villanueva says, Vilsa has new projects in the pipeline in the production process to reduce production dependence on re-rollable raw materials (metal scrap) and increase billet consumption.
This increase in production could also increase with the performance of Vilsa's commercial arm, Thanos Steel, a company that began two years ago as a warehouse for the commercialization of steel (with Vilsa products, national mills and imports) and with the explosive growth, has already ventured into a steel service center.
Thanos Steel was born with a project to market 500 mt per month and with the construction of a 9,000 square meter warehouse. Villanueva’s father and uncle (owners of Vilsa and minority partners in Thanos) only authorized the construction of the 4,500 square meter warehouse, the businessman commented in a telephone interview with SteelOrbis.
In the first six months, Villanueva said, the warehouse was saturated and they had to build the expansion to reach 9,000 square meters. As at the beginning, the size of the warehouse was insufficient to meet the demand and another warehouse had to be built, now 8,000 square meters, which began operations a couple of days ago.
Of the less than 1,900 mt per month that Thanos Steel sold at the end of 2022, in December 2023 it sold 2,300 mt and the forecast for 2024 is to sell more than 2,800 mt per month, which would be 25 percent more.
Villanueva said the secret of the explosive growth is that Thanos Steel returned to serving smaller distributors, since Vilsa concentrated on large distributors and left smaller distributors forgotten.
He says that Vilsa, with its commercial profiles, supplies clients of the stature of Collado, Villacero, among others. In addition to purchasing products to market to large mills in Mexico, it also imports plate from Asia, hot rolled coil (HRC) from New Zealand, coated from India and cold rolled coil (CRC) from Vietnam. The machinery has been imported from India.
Regarding the expansion of the companies, Villanueva commented that his objective is to consolidate his presence in the area of the State of Mexico, the second largest economy in the country, a state that is also part of the metropolitan area of Mexico City, the largest market in the country with more than 23 million inhabitants.