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Purchased through Kestenbaum’s Miami-based private equity firm Bedrock Industries Group LLC in June, Stelco has major advantages over some of its predecessors and competitors. After $4.4 billion of debt and pension obligations were eliminated through a restructuring that ended this year, Stelco has a clean balance sheet, along with $230 million of fresh cash raised in the IPO. The company says in its prospectus its total costs are “among the lowest in North America” and it expects its margins to expand as it uses more of its assets and regains lost volume.

What’s more, Kestenbaum has a track record of finding and turning around struggling metal companies at Miami-based Globe Specialty Metals Inc., which he bought for US$1 million in 2006. After 11 acquisitions and a merger with Grupo FerroAtlantica, London-based Ferroglobe Plc is now worth about US$2.7 billion. Kestenbaum believes he can achieve similar returns at Stelco.

“Two or three more acquisitions down the road and we’ll turn around and we’ll be $6 billion, $7 billion, $8 billion, why not?,” Kestenbaum says in an interview at Stelco’s Lake Erie Works in Nanticoke, Ontario.

The company declined to say how much Bedrock invested in the Stelco acquisition.

Joe Ragan, who worked as Kestenbaum’s chief financial officer at Globe Specialty Metals, says the man has “the magic.”

Two or three more acquisitions down the road and we (will) turn around and we (will) be $6 billion, $7 billion, $8 billion, why not? Alan

“He always gets an extraordinary deal for the assets he buys,” Ragan, now Ferroglobe’s CFO, says of his former boss. “He’s got a very sharp acuity on how to structure a deal to get a really good value.”