4. Conclusion

As Julian Szekely said in 1994, "the stage is now set for the industrial introduction of strip casting in stainless steel production" [60] .

Five years have passed since then, and at the end of 1998 Nippon Steel announced that its Hikari plant had been upgraded from pilot to commercial production status. However, the level of production is still of the same order of magnitude as that of pilot plants of equivalent size, which probably makes it impossible to envisage this plant operating profitably in the short term. The external growth which characterizes the current restructuring of the world steel industry has called into question the suitability of this new continuous strip casting technology for the strategy of the companies thus reconfigured. The short-term commercial future of the major projects...