Russian steelmaker NLMK announced its Q4 and FY2016 results in London yesterday, highlighting revenue of US$7.64 billion for the year and revenue growth in the last quarter of 20% year-on-year to US$1.97 billion.

In the last quarter of 2016 capital expenditure (capex) grew to US$175 million against the backdrop of the launch of NLMK’s Stoilensky Pelletising plant (production capacity 16.9mt).

While Capex grew to US$175 million in Q4, it decreased by 6% to US$559 over 2016. Maintenance capex totalled US$296 million.

Strong operational and financial results have characterised 2016, according to NLMK. Sales hit an all-time high at 15.93Mt, up 1%.

‘Home’ markets accounted for 65% of overall sales and the company’s key external markets were in the Middle East, Turkey, Europe and Latin America.

NLMK claims that its business model is based on operational efficiency, a world-class resource base and leading positions in key markets.

Since 2001, the Russian steelmaker has spent in the region of US$1.36 billion on environmental investments and this has steadily increased over time. In 2012 the company invested US$77 million, but in 2016 this figure jumped to US$564 million (US$454 million the previous year).

Air emissions at NLMK steel plants have witnessed a steady decline from 22.6kg/t steel (2012) to 20.8kg/t steel in 2016. The company’s 2020 target is 19.4kg/t.

In 2016 NLMK produced 16.6Mt of crude steel of which 8.1Mt was flat steel and 4.7Mt merchant slabs. Smaller quantities of long products (1.9Mt), merchant billets (0.7Mt), merchant pig iron (0.4Mt) and metalware (0.3Mt) were produced.

In his concluding remarks, NLMK’s CEO Oleg Bagrin said that the management had delivered substantial progress in terms of strategy execution. He said that US$547 million net gains had been achieved between 2014 and 2016 and that strategy implementation had generated better shareholder returns and stronger overall results.

Bagrin said that further gains were expected this year and next from late stage investment projects and that NLMK had taken a leading position in sustainability and safety. Lost time injury frequency rates across the group dropped from 2.03 in 2013 to 0.82 in 2016.