Bulgaria’s largest metallurgical plant, Kremikovtzi, was planning to become a player on the country’s real estate market, the company’s management announced on October 15, as quoted by mediapool.bg.

Kremikovtzi, which is owned by India's Global Steel Holdings Limited, has 1 200 hectares of land on its site near the capital Sofia. The land represents the largest single plot on the territory of Sofia Municipality.

A week earlier, Sofia’s chief architect Petar Dikov said the plant should be demolished and a new business centre, a new “city”, should be built in its place. Sofia Mayor Boiko Borissov, who is currently running in the local elections for a second mandate, backed the idea.

Responding to the pleas, Kremikovtzi’s executive director Alexander Tomov said they were ready to support such a project if the future “city” would coexist with the plant. The company was open to real estate developers willing to participate and was ready to co-operate with Sofia Municipality on any project that would boost the economic growth of the northern part of Sofia, Tomov was quoted by mediapoool.bg as saying.
Kremikovtzi planned to get rid of some of its non-core business operations to avoid financial losses, Tomov said.

By the end of 2007, Kremikovtzi would transfer 900 of its current 6800 employees to a new engineering division. The separate company would accept orders from Kremikovtzi but would be paid as an external supplier and would have a license to do business with other clients.
Kremikovtzi was ready to invest 308 million leva in measures aiming to align production operations to the relevant environmental protection requirements. The Environment and Waters Ministry had been pressuring the plant to stick to the norms, which was the prerequisite for the steel mill to acquire the mandatory integrated pollution prevention and control permit that it had so far failed to obtain.