Hitachi and Nippon Steel have a 64M venture with Singapore's government opening in early 1998.
It would dwarf the next-largest firm, Japan's Nippon Steel, which produced just over 30m tonnes in 2005.
Itoh, Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Nippon Steel, NKK Corporation, Sumitomo Metal Industries and Kawasaki Steel Corporation, have been adversely affected.
Son of a Croatian immigrant, Andrnico Sr. began investing in the mining business in northern Chile with financing from Nippon Steel.
With underfunded pension schemes, firms such as Hitachi and Nippon Steel are increasingly giving money to investment-advisory firms specialist fund managers, in effect.
ECONOMIST: Japanese finance: Rich pickings for the gaijin | The
In commodity news, Rio Tinto agreed to slash iron ore prices in a deal with Japan's Nippon Steel by at least 33%.
Mitsubishi wants to take orders from companies that are too small to deal directly with the likes of Nippon Steel, Japan's biggest steel maker.
The most disturbing case was Nippon Steel, Japan's biggest steel maker, whose top managers had not heard of the Year 2000 problem until a year ago.
Noting Ford's close relationship with Nippon Steel, Mr Polites said the marginal cost of importing from Japan was "a hell of a lot less than losing a couple of days of production".
But since the biggest Chinese steelmaker, Baosteel, had only a 6% share of its home market (Nippon Steel, by contrast, controlled a third of the Japanese market), it lacked the bargaining power for negotiations behind closed doors.
Nippon Telegraph and Telephone is lobbying hard for the InfoBind system it has developed with Kobe Steel.
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