Corus is a customer focused, innovative value-driven company which manufactures, processes and distributes steel products and services to customers worldwide.

Corus is Europe's second largest steel producer with annual revenues of around £12 billion and a crude steel production of over 20 million tones. Today Corus is part of the vast Tata Steel Group which is among the top ten steel producers in the world.

Sales Direct Project

Sales Direct were appointed to the task of identifying potential end users for Corus’s CastCoat product  which is a ceramic coating applied to the faces of continuous steel casting slab and bloom mould copper cooling plates to prolong its operational life. The benefits of CastCoat are as follows:

Increases continuous steel casting mould plate service life: -Thick slab moulds up to 3x and thin slab up to 8x better.

Improves continuous steel casting mould availability.

Improves cast product shape and quality.

Acts as a barrier to “copper pickup” from the continuous steel casting mould plates by the cast product.

Results

Overall, the Sales Direct project manager encountered a good response in the presentation of CPE’s CastCoat from the range of steel plants approached in a refined prospect list of 35 companies.

One difficult aspect of the project was the task of reaching the relevant decision maker in person.  As CPE had suggested, a Process/Casting Engineer from each prospect company was the initial contact that Sales Direct’s staff should attempt to reach. Some difficulty in reaching these contacts arose in the fact that, often times, Process/Casting Engineers are not in their offices and are hard to track down. This resulted in a high volume of voicemail messages being left.  In fact, there were still two plants where the key contact was not available to be reached directly at any point during the course of this project. Direct contact was finally gained even up to the last day of the project. However, initial proposals were sent out to 21 companies where the Process/Casting Engineer had requested further information.

Brian Stalker from CPE has acted as a reference client on several occasions for Sales Direct LLC