Page 61 - ITAtube Journal 1 2024

Interview
tions in the context of steel construction and explain the benefits of designing and building with steel tube. However, although tubes the superior solution in terms of creativity and design among architects, they are under-represented in final building projects compared to beams and plates.
The European tube industry is currently suffering from high energy costs compared to other regions in the world. What possible consequences do you draw from this?
On one hand, energy efficient production processes will be a must going forward. Machine and tools suppliers will play an important role to make production sus- tainable also for European producers. On the other hand, there will be little alterna- tive for tube producers in Europe than to specialize into more sophisticated solutions for tube consumers. Again, an interesting field for innovation for machine and tools suppliers.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its possibil- ities to improve industrial processes and customer services seems to become a mega trend. In some areas of our industry AI has already been introduced. How do you see the prospects for the tubular industry incor- porating AI?
In the industry, AI will certainly become one of the standard working tool in future. Just a way of efficiently exploiting big data. Not more and not less. In that sense, just as in
any other industry AI will establish its way in our industry for the enhancement of processes and decision-making in planning, production and quality. But there is still some time before we will see specific tools adapted to tube production.
The decarbonization of the industry has been set as a key theme of the TUBE Düssel- dorf trade fair. We are aware, that Arcelor Mittal is here a leading trend setter. What are your expectation in this regard?
We definitely see increasing interest from customer side. Current economic chal- lenges may temporarily cause doubts about the viability due to incurring costs and price premiums. But decarbonization will remain a paradigm of industrial policy not only in Europe. We just start to see more and more initiatives in the USA and India.
Companies with an industrial base in Europe will develop further on this path and will need a strong decarbonized supply chain. This is where ArcelorMittal is pio- neering the industry with its extremely diversified XCarb product range of low-car- bon products incl. tubes.
Furthermore, my hope is that during the Tube Fair we will succeed in raising the con- sciousness of our customer to tackle their Scope 1 and 2 quantification. This is why we welcome the EcoMetals initiative taken by Messe Düsseldorf.
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ITAtube Journal April 2024
61