Turkish billionaire Fuat Tosyalı's Algerian cold rolling mill produces its first steel

The steel complex Fuat Tosyalı has spent thirteen years building on the Algerian coast has produced its first cold-rolled coil.

Tosyalı Algérie said it successfully made its first pickled and oiled and cold-rolled product at the Pickling and Tandem Cold Rolling Mill at Béthioua, in Oran province, the first output from the Cold Rolling Complex. The company described it as a milestone in commissioning and in a growth strategy running from Algeria into global markets.

The mill produces value-added flat steel for the automotive, white goods, construction, energy and advanced manufacturing sectors. Those are the grades that carry margin, and they are the reason the complex exists in its current form.

Cold rolling is the last link in the chain. The mill takes coil from the 2.5 million-ton hot rolling complex that came online in October 2024 and turns it into sheet thin enough and clean enough for car bodies and appliance panels. With it running, Béthioua becomes a fully integrated flat steel site, from iron ore through direct reduction, electric arc furnace, hot rolling and now cold rolling, on one piece of ground.

Tosyalı had guided for start-up between August and September. The first coil has arrived ahead of that.

Financing came partly from Algerian investors. Tosyalı Algérie raised 15 billion dinars, about $115 million, through a bond issue last year to fund the cold rolling mill and an accompanying galvanizing line. The bond documentation specified 800,000 tons of annual cold rolling capacity and 400,000 tons of galvanizing, figures that sit below the 1.4 million tons the company has cited elsewhere for the wider complex.

The scale of what sits behind it is considerable. Tosyalı began at Béthioua in 2013 with rebar to feed Algeria's construction boom, and expanded in phases from there. The site is now the largest Turkish industrial investment anywhere outside Turkey and among the biggest privately owned steel complexes on the African continent. Tosyalı Algérie is Algeria's largest private sector employer outside hydrocarbons.

Fuat Tosyalı announced a further $2.5 billion programme in April, at the Tube and Wire fair in Düsseldorf, adding 3 million tons of Algerian capacity and doubling daily output from 50,000 to 100,000 tons within thirty months. Roughly 700,000 tons of the new capacity is earmarked for automotive-grade steel, aimed at Algerian local content rules that require car manufacturers to source 10% domestically within two years of starting production and 30% within five. First automotive deliveries are expected in the third quarter of this year.

The African build-out extends well past Algeria. Tosyalı has begun work in Libya on a direct reduced iron plant of 8.1 million tons, which would rank among the largest in the world and serve as a base for green steel. In Angola it is preparing to develop iron ore reserves estimated at 2 billion tons, targeting 10 million tons a year, with the ore feeding furnaces elsewhere in the group. It also operates in Senegal and Spain.

The group runs roughly 50 facilities across three continents. It produced 9.12 million tons of liquid steel in 2024, climbing 21 places in the World Steel Association rankings to 46th globally. Tosyalı has said publicly he intends to reach the top 20.

The business started in a workshop in Iskenderun, where Fuat Tosyalı began working alongside his father Serif at the age of five, making sheet metal out of used tin cheese cans. That became buckets and stoves, then rolled steel, then a group with production on three continents.

He owns it with his younger brothers Ayhan and Fatih. Forbes lists all three as billionaires and valued Fuat at about $1.2 billion. The family began investing in Algeria in 2008 and had committed more than $6 billion to the Oran facilities by the end of 2019. Fuat has flown out weekly on his own aircraft to look at them.

Neither the company nor Steel Radar disclosed a date for full commercial operation of the cold rolling complex, or a ramp-up schedule to nameplate capacity.