Universal, which was incorporated in 1994, and its wholly-owned subsidiaries,
manufacture and market semi-finished and finished specialty steel products,
including stainless steel, nickel alloys, tool steel and certain other premium
alloyed steels. Our manufacturing process involves melting, remelting, heat
treating, hot and cold rolling, forging, machining and cold drawing of semi-finished
and finished specialty steels. Our products are sold to service centers, forgers,
rerollers, original equipment manufacturers (“OEMs”) and wire redrawers.
Our customers further process our products for use in a variety of industries,
including the aerospace, power generation, oil and gas, heavy equipment and
general industrial markets. We also perform conversion services on materials
supplied by customers.
We operate in four locations: Bridgeville and Titusville, Pennsylvania; Dunkirk,
New York; and North Jackson, Ohio. Our corporate headquarters is located at
our Bridgeville location. We operate these four manufacturing locations as one
reportable business segment.
We produce a wide variety of specialty steel grades using several manufacturing
processes including argon oxygen decarburization (“AOD”), electro-slag
remelted (“ESR”), vacuum induction melting (“VIM”) and
vacuum-arc remelted (“VAR”). At our Bridgeville and North Jackson
facilities, we produce specialty steel products in the form of semi-finished
and finished long products (ingots, blooms, billets and bars). In addition,
the Bridgeville facility produces flat rolled products (slabs and plates). Semi-finished
long products are primarily used by our Dunkirk facility and certain customers
to produce finished bar, rod, wire and plate products. Finished bar products
that we manufacture are primarily used by OEMs and by service center customers
for distribution to a variety of end users. We also produce customized shapes
primarily for OEMs that are cold rolled from purchased coiled strip, flat bar
or extruded bar at our precision rolled products department, located at our
Titusville facility.
The specialty steel industry is a relatively small but distinct segment of
the overall steel industry. Specialty steels include stainless steels, nickel
alloys, tool steels, electrical steels, high-temperature alloys, magnetic alloys
and electronic alloys. Specialty steels are made with a high alloy content,
suitable for use in environments that demand exceptional hardness, toughness,
strength and resistance to heat, corrosion or abrasion, or combinations thereof.
Specialty steels generally must conform to more demanding customer specifications
for consistency, straightness and surface finish than carbon steels.