Nucor/Chaparral mini-mill competitive challenge to integrated steel mills

The disruptive business model — buy scrap, make electric-furnace steel, beat integrated mills on capital cost.

I've taken you from one person-year per ton in the making of steel to the modern age — by 1990 we were at sort of three or four person-hours per ton, or six. Then the mini-mills came along in 1975, and some of these guys learned that you could buy scrap steel on the world market for a hundred dollars a ton. You could make cast iron from virgin ore for 180 a ton. They said, "I like that idea of 80 a ton excess profit by just melting old steel rather than taking virgin ore. I'm going to build an electric furnace plant." One of the guys who did this, a guy named Gordon Forward, a graduate of this department — Nucor Steel — is the one who made it the biggest. They made what they called mini-mills.