Chapter 14 - Merger & Acquisition

The name "NUCOR" was derived by the Nucor Board of Directors in 1971, about the same time the firm dropped its conglomerate business structure and initiated its singular focus on steel making.  Prior to 1971, the firm had been called The Nuclear Corporation of America.  Given that they had sold off or closed any business units focused on nuclear power and instead were making profits from a single division that the firm had bought in 1962 (Vulcraft, a maker of steel joists), a name change seemed appropriate.

Since 1971, Nucor has grown via acquisitions and organic expansion.  The first steel mill was opened to provide Vulcraft with a cheaper source of raw materials.  But Nucor began to supply other processing firms as well, and so was born their steel generation business.

Nucor has acquired roughly a dozen or so firms since 1971.  Two of the biggest were the purchase of Harris Steel Group in 2006 and David J. Joseph in 2007.  The purchase of Harris Steel Group for $1.07B was a Product Extension Merger, which provided Nucor access to the rebar fabrication market.  Nucor has doubled production in this market since the acquisition of Harris Steel.  Harris Steel also generates steel mesh and grating.

The purchase of David J Joseph for $1.44B in 2008 was a Vertical Merger as Nucor shored up its supply of scrap metal.  The backward integration of DJJ, one of the nation's largest scrap processors and brokers, was instrumental for Nucor because scrap makes up 75-90% of its resource in producing new steel components.

At this time NUE seems very content to continue expanding with organic growth by bringing new plants online and using a variety of new technologies to improve production and reduce costs.  NUE has reported any acquisitions targets at this time, but I don't think NUE will entertain any kind of conglomerate mergers, but will instead continue to focus on the challenges of producing steel.

Chapter 13 - Strategic Alliances

As described in earlier posts, Nucor is Limited Diversification firm with Single to Dominant-business setup within the steel industry.  Nucor does not currently execute any kind of business activities outside of the steel industry.

That said, Nucor has established strategic alliances within the steel industry.  The alliance types are joint ventures, which means that Nucor and the company with which the alliance is formed have created a new independent entity and each of the firms in the alliance own a portion of the new company.  In Nucor's case, the joint ventures are 50/50 operations.

The first alliance with Mitsui &Co. created NuMit LLC, which itself owns Steel Technologies LLC.  Steel Technologies (http://www.steeltechnologies.com/Pages/Home.aspx) creates products from Nucor supplied flat-rolled steel that Nucor itself does not produce.  Via the alliance, Nucor was able to enter a different finished products market without having to invest in the necessary machinery to craft the products - it was low-cost entry into a new market.  This alliance also left Nucor open to continue sales to other sheet processing companies.

The second alliance with Duferdofin was again a low-cost entry into new markets, this time into an overseas market. 

Chapter 12 - Implementing Corporate Diversification

All of the items covered within Chapter 12 are covered in Nucor's investor documentation, which can be found here: http://www.nucor.com/investor/. The URL contains Nucor's Annual Report, Proxy Statement and Sustainability Report.  Other information regarding the board of directors and compensation policies can be found in Nucor's 10K filing, which is here: http://www.nucor.com/investor/sec/.