Czech energy group hints at combined bid for British Steel and Speciality Steel UK

The owner of the UK’s largest electric steelworks has said the government should find a single buyer for British Steel and Speciality Steel UK (SSUK), a move that would create the country’s biggest steelmaker.

Sev.en Global Investments, owned by the Czech billionaire Pavel Tykač, said it not only plans to invest £100m in the UK – mainly in the electric arc steelworks in Cardiff it bought last year – but also has the ability to invest “hundreds of millions of pounds” more in Britain under its 7 Steel brand.

Alan Svoboda, Sev.en’s chief executive, told the Guardian the government should look for a large company with a track record of steel production to take on British Steel’s plant in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, and the SSUK electric arc furnace operation in South Yorkshire, in a thinly veiled pitch for the government to consider 7 Steel as a potential buyer.

The government took control of British Steel in April last year because of fears its Chinese owners were about to close the business. Four months later the official receiver took control of SSUK from the previous owners, Liberty Steel, after it was declared “hopelessly insolvent”.

Svoboda said he was unable to discuss specific talks with the government or any other parties but that “a combination might be a much more attractive solution” if it needed less taxpayer support.

“It would be a more robust or a more peace of mind-type solution to look for parties that already are feeding the industry, that have steel industry expertise and balance sheet,” he said. “We have a long-term view. We believe we could be a solid partner to the government to achieve something that is very ambitious.”

Svoboda added that there was the potential to invest more in steel processing to make more profitable goods rather than commodity products. He said there was “not really” a need to cut jobs because workers could shift to these “downstream” operations.

Any bidder for the two businesses would have to persuade the government to abandon exclusive talks to sell SSUK to Blastr, a Norwegian startup. It would also depend on the government reaching a deal with British Steel’s Chinese owner, Jingye, to compensate it for its loss of control. However, the prospect may be attractive to government officials, some of whom have previously expressed their hopes for a combination.

Sev.en’s planned £100m investment in Cardiff and other sites in the UK bought from the Spanish group Celsa will potentially include a new furnace using hydrogen to melt steel. Svoboda said there should be a “more thorough debate” on the future of British Steel and SSUK.

“We are still in growth mode,” he said. “We still have capital to deploy. We are trying hard to get exposed to the industry more.”

Svoboda said Sev.en’s investment plans were partly driven by the UK government’s decision to impose 50% protectionist tariffs on global steel imports above set quotas. The tariffs will give UK steelmakers an advantage when serving their home market.

“With the introduction of these measures we became excited to make more investment,” Svoboda said. He added that the steel industry was “not yet out of the bottom of the cycle” of a global downturn, but in the longer term: “We are big believers in the steel industry in the UK.”

SSUK’s electric arc furnaces are generally seen as attractive assets that were starved of operating cash, and Svoboda said British Steel will require significant government subsidies to upgrade its technology to electric arc furnaces to produce lower-emissions steel.

If Sev.en were to succeed in a bid for British Steel and SSUK, it would potentially overtake Tata Steel as the largest steelmaker in the country and make Pavel Tykač one of the key players in UK industry. Tata is building an electric arc furnace at its Port Talbot site, with £500m of state support, after the closure of the south Wales plant’s blast furnaces in 2024.

Tykač, whose total fortune is estimated by Forbes to be worth $8.9bn (£6.5bn), started out as a computer distributor in the early 1990s, before buying a series of coal power stations in the Czech Republic and combining them to form the Sev.en energy group.

Svoboda, a former McKinsey consultant, said Sev.en Global Investments owns assets worth $3bn. The company has bought up a series of fossil fuel assets, including coalmines in the US, Australia and Vietnam to feed power generation and blast furnace steelmaking, as well as four gas-fired power plants in the UK under the InterGen brand.

Sev.en has previously described its strategy as a “contrarian approach”, betting that the transition away from polluting fossil fuels will be slower than other investors expect.