The world’s largest producer of oil drilling pipes, Tenaris, announced it entered an agreement to take over Artrom Steel Tubes, the most important Romanian producer of seamless steel pipe. The deal is for an aggregate purchase price of EUR 86 million and will be conducted on a cash-free and debt-free basis, including a normalised level of working capital.
Artrom, part of the Russian TMK group before the Western sanctions, is operating a pipe factory in the Slatina plant and a steel mill in Reșița, with combined revenues of EUR 400 million and 2,000 employees.
The seller is Great Lakes Global Holdings (GLGH), from Chicago, Illinois, which had acquired the Romanian company at the beginning of last year from the investment banking firm Hefestos Capital, controlled and led by Serbians Milutin Nikolic and Pavle Kavran in January 2025. Hefestos Capital, in turn, took over Artrom from TMK in 2023.
The transaction is subject to customary regulatory conditions, including clearance from the European Union competition authorities and Romanian government approvals. Closing is expected to occur during the fourth quarter of 2026.
Artrom Steel Tubes is a Romanian manufacturer of steel and seamless steel pipes, with an annual steelmaking capacity of approximately 450,000 metric tons at its facility in Reșița, and seamless pipe rolling capacity of up to 200,000 metric tons at its Slatina facility. The acquisition is expected to expand Tenaris’s industrial pipe product range and manufacturing footprint, strengthening its ability to serve customers in the European industrial segment.
Tenaris already owns a small-diameter seamless pipe manufacturer, Silcotub in Romania, one of the most important industrial companies in Romania. Silcotub operates a pipe factory in Zalău, a steel mill in Călărași, a sucker rod factory in Câmpina, service centres in Ploiești and Cluj-Napoca, and a scrap metal collection centre in Popești Leordeni, with commercial offices in Bucharest.
The Tenaris-Artrom deal was announced several days after Ukraine’s Interpipe, controlled by billionaire Victor Pinchuk, announced it began production of seamless pipes on its production capacity recently acquired from ArceloMittal in northeastern Romania at Roman.
With only 300 employees and operating only one of its three production lines, Roman-based, now renamed Interpipe Roman, falls well below the size of Artrom – but the capacity is used by the new owner to optimise the producing capacities by processing billet from the main Interpipe Steel plant in Ukraine. All three production lines will be opened, and Interpipe is already investing in its steel mill in Dnipro to be able to cover 100% of the steel needs from its own smelter.
iulian@romania-insider.com
(Photo source: Facebook/Tenaris)
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