Fortune’s Shawn Tully writes: -- It was my first encounter with a Russian
billionaire. The setting was a nondescript meeting room, down a long, bland
hallway of meeting rooms, at the Sheraton New York Hotel, where Alexey
Mordashov was attending a steel industry conference. His press people had
cautioned that Mordashov, Russia's leading steel magnate as chief of Severstal
(2011 revenues: $15 billion) and one of his nation's biggest investors in the
U.S., is the antithesis of the flamboyant Russian oligarch. He eschews
collecting yachts or U.S. basketball franchises, and instead supports the local
hockey team in his hometown of Cherepovets, where his parents labored in the
giant steel mill Severstal now owns.
Mordashov, attired in a blue suit and loosely-knotted blue
tie, greets me with a crunching handshake worthy of a welder. He speaks fluent
if heavily accented English learned as a business student at Northumbria
University in Britain. At 46, Mordashov is trim and youthful-looking with
neatly-cropped brown hair. Indeed, after starting as a low-level finance
manager, he rose to head Severstal in 1996 at age 30, building a conglomerate
by purchasing steel, mining and coal companies. His net worth reportedly
exceeds $18 billion.
Mordashov became the one of the first major Russian
investors in the U.S. when Severstal purchased the legendary Rouge plant in
Dearborn, Michigan, in 2004. "Steel plants in the U.S. were in worse shape
than the Russian plants we renovated," says Mordashov. "A lot of the technology
was 150 years old. They'd suffered from under-investment for many
years." Worker morale, he adds, was
as big a problem as decaying furnaces. "People were expecting Rouge to go
bankrupt, so there was a lot of anxiety. The corporate culture problem was even
worse than in Russia. And at the same time, the work rules were more difficult…."
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