Qatar Steel is positioned to play a crucial role in building the sustainable cities of the future. Our steel makes up the backbone of new buildings, large public infrastructure projects, and other flagship initiatives such as the stadiums for the Qatar 2022 Football World Cup.

At the same time as the international and local steel industry is experiencing an increased demand for high-quality steel products, we are witnessing an increased supply of Chineses teel production, driven by the slowdown in China’s economy. This has impacted international prices of steel, and presents new opportunities and challenges for our business. But it is not just the business environment that matters to our stakeholders. The way that we conduct our affairs and our business, as well as the quality and sustainability of Our Main Products, is also of great importance to our stakeholders. We are thus committed to responsible operations and upstanding conduct across our operations.

In this website, we highlight our achievements and challenges in ‘making steel matter’ through operational and environmental efficiency, profitable growth, and good corporate citizenship. Our sustainability concerns go beyond our direct operations; they also focus on innovation, the development of more sustainable products and recycling solutions, and the creation of a healthy and safe environment for our people. It is all of these, taken together, that are encompassed by the idea of ‘sustainable steel’.

With this in mind, I am very proud of the steps we took in 2014 towards leading sustainability management. We brought online our fifth Electric Arc Furnace (EAF5), with a production capacity of 1.04 million tonnes per annum. We also managed to develop a new variety of high-strength steel which reduces the consumption of construction materials and carries great environmental benefits. Additionally, we succeeded in initiating several programmes to recycle our waste, such as the dust produced by our plants, and also to recycle waste from Qatar Petroleum, Q-Chem, QAFCO, Qatalum, and Qatargas which we use as an input for our own production.

While we continue to maintain our high health and safety standards via the certification of OHSAS18001:2007, we have also experienced some important challenges. We were deeply saddened to have witnessed one fatality among our staff in 2014, a tragedy which has greatly affected our Qatar Steel family. We have carried out an extensive examination of the accident’s causes, and have put into place a range of measures designed to ensure that such a situation can never arise again.

Acknowledging that better performance comes from stronger strategic commitment, we have worked in 2014 to integrate sustainability priorities into our Corporate Strategy and into our balanced scorecard. Our approach to sustainability management ensures that all of our departments now have solid tasks assigned to them which will ensure that they work as a single unit to enhance our sustainability performance.

Looking ahead, we will work in 2015 to develop a Sustainability Roadmap which will provide further clarity of our five-year sustainability objectives and targets, as well as the action plans necessary to achieve those targets.

We recognise that transparency is crucial to the fostering of trust in our performance. That is why this year we improved our materiality analysis which has helped us to identify sustainability areas on which to focus our reporting and accountability. We will continue to report publically through our sustainability report and to actively participate in the Qatar Energy and Industry Sector Sustainability (QEISS) Programme, harnessing our past achievements to improve our sustainability performance in the future.

I acknowledge and applaud the progress that has been achieved by my colleagues at Qatar Steel, but also recognise that sustainability is a journey for us and that we will need to continue to adapt to our changing landscape and stakeholder expectations. I would like to invite you to be part of this journey by providing us with your views on our performance.

Finally, I want to take this opportunity to thank our Board of Directors and stakeholders for their contributions to our ongoing success.