We’re learning that Japan’s Nippon Steel cannot acquire US Steel. The Pittsburgh-based entity had given itself up for acquisition in the heat of steely-fire global competition which has decimated the iconic company. The Biden Administration blocked a $14.1 billion deal which would have brought an investment of $3 billion and kept some older plants intact. To save those jobs, it is very likely that the US government will inject some funds into US Steel. Hello, that is Pennsylvania and this is election season!
When you read about the men who built America, this company has a “chapter”. When the United States overtook the United Kingdom at the end of the 1890s, the Americans wanted a pillar upon which they could scale a virtuoso industrialization vision. Two men – JP Morgan (the banker) and Andrew Carnegie (the industrialist) – decided in 1901 to establish US Steel (sure, many mutations happened). The company became a catalyst as America industrialized. Simply, US Steel was a fulcrum of America’s 20th century economic dominance.
When I went to interview at Carnegie Mellon University for a faculty job, the dean took me to a building. He explained how Carnegie designed some campus buildings with a steel roll in mind, just in case if the educational vision fails, he could convert all to a plant. As a faculty, you would see that he created that university in the likeness of his industrialization playbook: tons of technical components. CMU is ranked #1 or #2 in AI, autonomous systems, computer science and computer engineering in the US.
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By 1917, the largest publicly traded company in the United States was US Steel. But things happened. Yes, fifty years later, in 1967, the largest recorded public company on market cap in the US was IBM. Later, it was GE in the early 1980s. Today, we have knowledge companies like Apple and Microsoft running the show.
In all these cases, we can learn of one thing: accelerating destruction. Simply, generations of companies prepare nations for the next phase, and if they succeed, most times, they fade in relevance. When US Steel powered America, its success produced infrastructure companies like IBM and Intel which then provided automation and computing capabilities for GE across industries. GE organized America in many ways, seeding pillars which enabled modern knowledge firms like Apple and Microsoft to blossom.
The next generation of largest American companies will feed on the success of Google, Microsoft and Apple. I posit that native and new species of AI companies will rule the markets by 2050. It is magical that US Steel is looking for economic fire for the steel!
Possibly, this acquisition would have gone through if there was no war in Europe. Yes, even though US Steel may seem overlooked as the rain has since stopped falling there, it makes a product which remains vital for America’s national security. Biden does not want to disarm America even in the hands of an “ally”. But as they say, woe to that giant which cannot make its steel. And a giant wants to keep it in-house because things happen!
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While a certain geographic space called Nigeria couldn’t complete Ajeokuta Steel, for known and unknown reasons. When every intentional nation wants to build what would catalyze their future, it rallies its people to build for it. For Nigeria, it goes about searching for who to contract and squander money with or borrow from, in the end, nothing gets completed. It’s 2024, and we just managed to have man with his head above the water refined a litre of petrol for us, only that Nigeria doesn’t even have a crude oil to feed the refinery…
All we have done for decades of pitiful existence is reading and listening to what great people did elsewhere, and afterwards we turn everything on its head and become more pathetic. What stage of industrialization are we in? We disappointed in Electricity, couldn’t do Steel and therefore abandoned it; Oil and Gas that bring great fortunes elsewhere, we only used ours to rack up debts and become poorer.
As if our bad behaviour wasn’t bad enough, we then graduated to globetrotting, from China to India, from Turkey to UAE, from Saudi to US, and everything in between, in search of partners in crime, which we euphemistically call investors.
It is more honourable to be dead than living shamelessly.