Pittsburgh Tribune reported that three years after selling Esmark Inc at the height of the steel industry boom, Mr James P Bouchard has built a new Esmark into one of the nation's top steel companies and plans to build a USD 9 million headquarters in Edgeworth.

Mr Bouchard, a Chicago native and Sewickley resident, is bullish about the prospects for his steel service company, which he said has grown into the 21st largest steel company in the nation.

Mr Bouchard is CEO of Esmark Inc, which operates five subsidiaries. Four of those are steel service companies that purchase large amounts of steel directly from mills, then process it into smaller quantities for resale to manufacturers, machine shops and other users.

He added that "We will hit USD 10 million in profit this year, and we will get to USD 20 million next year." He added that sales for 2011 are projected to be USD 430 million, up from USD 165 million in 2010. Production will rise from a projected 72 million tonnes in 2011 to 90 million tonnes in 2012.

The company that Mr Bouchard started on the third floor of his Sewickley home now has a global reach, with sales in China, India and Greece, he said during a rainy event to start construction of Esmark Center, the headquarters of his steel company.

The 39,000 square foot building is scheduled for completion in early 2013. The structure will stand on a 2.25 acre site off Route 65 just across the border from Sewickley.

The company occupies space in a downtown Sewickley building but will spread over 13,000 square feet of the headquarters building. Some tenants are lined up to occupy the other space in the building, but he declined to identify those.

Mr Bouchard said that the headquarters will host about 25 Esmark employees, with 100 workers other coming from other tenants. He could have chosen to locate the headquarters in the Chicago area, where the company has about 75% of its 380 employees.

Although the steel industry has yet to fully recover from the recession, Bouchard has successfully put together the kind of steel service company he had operated prior to acquiring the former Wheeling Pittsburgh Steel Corporation in 2007.

He sold the original Esmark Inc, which included Wheeling Pittsburgh, to Russian steel maker OAO Severstal for USD 775 million in July 2008. A few months later, the financial crisis hit and the bottom fell out of the industry.

(Sourced from www.pittsburghlive.com)