Nippon Steel announced in December 2023 that it plans to acquire U.S. Steel, which has a history of more than 120 years. On the 2nd local time, the United Steelworkers of the United States, which opposes the acquisition plan, issued a statement saying that their position against being acquired has won the support of Biden in the United States. Japan's Kyodo News Agency reported that although ** does not have the right to directly block the acquisition, it may become an obstacle to the realization of the acquisition.
Nippon Steel is the largest steel company in Japan and ranks fourth in the world in crude steel production. U.S. Steel is the third-largest steelmaker in the U.S. and 27th in the world. If the two companies are merged, they will rise to third place in the global rankings. Nippon Steel plans to acquire all of U.S. Steel's shares at a premium of about 40% at $55 per share** for a total of $14.1 billion, making it the largest acquisition in Nippon Steel's history. Nippon Steel recently said that Japan's three major commercial banks have agreed to provide loans for the acquisition.
Steel in the United States, like automobiles, is an iconic industry of American deindustrialization. The main reason for the deindustrialization of the United States is the financialization of the American economic system. Under the logic of comprehensive financialization, the industrial system is not an organic whole, but a piece of subject matter that can be traded in the financial market, and the financial system only considers its own profits and does not care about the overall interests of the industry. A recent example is Boeing, where the management has been massively reducing costs in order to improve profit margins, so that no new models have been developed for nearly 20 years, coupled with the decline in the quality of the workforce, resulting in a number of major safety incidents.
The second is that the cultural characteristics of Westerners themselves are not conducive to industrial production. The anti-intellectualism that prevails in the West today is actually the deep background color of their national culture, and they are like that. Westerners have been at the end of primitive society for a long time, living on fishing, hunting, gathering and nomadism, and generally have a scattered and chaotic primitive cultural atmosphere, which is not very suitable for the arduous and heavy industrial society. It's just that the West used to be very strong and covered up the problem.