CLEVELAND, Ohio – Cleveland-Cliffs on Monday reported record steel shipments of $4.3 million in the second quarter, citing the positive impact of President Trump’s import tariffs, while also indicating its openness to selling various parts of the company.
CEO Lourenco Goncalves, in a Monday earnings call, indicated that the company is open to foreign investment and the sale of non-core assets. He also talked about the possibility of selling some core assets, such as idled steel mills.
“Going forward, foreign competitors need to acquire steel capacity within the United States if they want to participate in this desirable market,” Goncalves stated in a news release. “As a publicly traded America-based company centered on automotive, electrical steels, stainless and plate, Cleveland-Cliffs assets, business and footprint are uniquely positioned to benefit from this new reality.”
Goncalves expanded on the company’s options during an earnings call with analysts.
“Look, we are an asset-rich company, and we believe that we are so undervalued at this point that the sum of the parts is a lot more valuable than the company as it trades in the stock exchange,” Goncalves said. “So, we are open, and we are, at this point, in active conversations on a number of noncore assets that could be generating billions of dollars in cash inflow that will be used to pay down debt.”
Cliffs is also entertaining the idea of selling some of its idled facilities, which could be used to house data centers, Goncalves said. He identified idled steel mills in Illinois and Pennsylvania as ideal sites for data centers.
Goncalves also commented on his decision not to go forward with plans to replace the blast furnace at the company’s Middletown Works with two electric melting furnaces and a direct reduction line that would use hydrogen in place of natural gas.
“That was the end game of that project in Middletown,” he said, according to the transcript. “The very first thing – it’s clear by now that we will not have availability of hydrogen . . . So, it’s not like that project was canceled by the DOE because it was not. We informed the DOE that we would not be pursuing the project.”
What has since been discussed is a plan to “preserve and enhance Middletown using beautiful coal, beautiful coke, beautiful natural gas, our American iron ore from Minnesota, keeping the flagship Middletown Works as our flagship facility supplying automotive steels, and making our blast furnace operate fully under AI,” Goncalves said.
Cliffs’ reported second quarter consolidated revenues of $4.9 billion, compared to $4.6 billion in the first quarter. It announced adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) of $97 million in the second quarter compared to a loss of $174 million in the first quarter.
“Cliffs is a major supplier of steel to the automotive manufacturers, and the Trump Administration continues to show strong support to both the domestic steel and the domestic automotive sectors,” Goncalves said in press release. “We have started to see the positive impact that tariffs have on domestic manufacturing, protecting domestic jobs and national security.”
Cliffs is a vertically integrated steel company based in Cleveland. It has operations in the United States and Canada.
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