It's full of dreamers. All of us remember grand, would-be projects that never materialized. Few industries are less suited to insubstantial dreaming than steel.
Major projects require hundreds of millions of dollars and several years to complete.
In a market with worldwide overcapacity and narrow profit margins, the industry needs visionaries who make rational investments that earn an acceptable profit, not dreamers. The message at this year's conference was no different. This isn't enough. Failure to consider the return on capital has led to failures. In 1998, Allegheny Teledyne's five-year average return on capital was 19.5 percent, Forbes reports.