ROME – The first year of the COVID-19 pandemic has been a bit of a challenge for American Alloy Steel at 650 Harbor Way in Rome. The second year of the pandemic has been a complete turnaround and business is booming.
“2021 has been a great year. Beyond excellent,” said District Manager Frank Carzo. “All stars are somehow aligned for all centers of steel.”
Like most companies across the country, Carzo said American Alloy Steel faced a major downturn in business at the start of the pandemic. Carzo said the company weathered the storm as best it could and then business started to pick up in late 2020. This recovery was just the start of a banner year, a- he declared.
“The price of steel has probably almost tripled” in 2021, Carzo said. “We moved a lot of tonnage of steel.”
More than 32 million pounds of steel passed through American Alloy in Rome last year, Carzo said.
The Harbor Way Warehouse and Manufacturing Center is one of the company’s five main locations. They are headquartered in Houston, Texas.
The company provides a variety of alloy steel plate and carbon steel plate, shapes and patterns of precision flame cut steel plate, steel round bar and steel flat bar to customers around the world. whole for use in fabrication and steel fabrication in petrochemical refining, processing plant, power generation, pressure vessel fabrication, heat exchanger fabrication, mining equipment fabrication, marine construction offshore, naval and military steel fabrication and machined metal parts industries.
Carzo said the company stores steel at the Harbor Way site and then cuts and fulfills orders for customers nationwide and around the world.
Carzo attributes the increase in activity to an increase in demand for all types of steel, including military grade, construction and pressure vessel steels. He said there was a big call through the federal government for the construction of submarines and planes, which led to an increase in demand for steel. He also credits the government’s new infrastructure initiatives for increasing steel activity.
“We have a lot of work on the books,” Carzo said. “We expect another good year. Steel prices appear to be stabilizing.
In addition to all the new activities, Carzo said a major renovation project for the Rome warehouse in the coming year will be the installation of two new cranes, which are used to load and unload trucks and move the steel around the warehouse. He said he hopes the installations will be completed in the first or second quarter of the year.
Carzo said the warehouse has been slowly replacing cranes with better models for years, and this $500,000 project will see the last two cranes replaced and updated.
American Alloy Steel has about 33 employees in Rome, and Carzo said he’s managed to keep everyone on board during the pandemic — but not without a few positive virus cases here and there.
“We had a number of employees throughout the year,” Carzo said. “We had our challenges with that. In short, we got away with it. »
