Rustavi Steel LLC owns and operates the Rustavi Metallurgical Plant. It’s one of Georgia’s largest industrial companies and was founded in 1948. Hunnewell Partners has been involved in the management of Rustavi Steel since 2011 and its Board is chaired by Irakli Rukhadze. The other members of the Board are Benjamin Marson, Matthew Jenkins, David Vepkhvadze, Lana Berulava, Nugzar Kachukhashvili (CEO) and Archil Melikadze (Deputy CEO).

Lying 30km south of Georgia’s capital Tbilisi, Rustavi Steel is the largest metallurgical complex in the Caucasus region and employs over 1,300 people. It manufactures reinforcing bars, seamless pipes, square billets, pig-iron castings, metal constructions, mechanical parts, shaped castings, granulated slag, silicon-manganese, lime and limestone. 

In recent years, Rustavi Steel has been undergoing a restructuring and modernisation programme to increase the company’s production capacity, re-establish itself in regional markets and position it for expansion into additional global markets.

This programme includes automation, increasing energy efficiency and developing proprietary technology for extraction and recycling, which has positively impacted both production costs and environmental processes. The programme has seen rebar production and sales double from 64,000 in 2014 to 129,000 in 2019. It is also now producing and selling seamless pipes under its own Rustavi Steel brand.

In 2019, the company began investment in a new electric arc furnace to enable it to start producing round billets again for the first time since 1985. This will help Rustavi Steel capitalise on its seamless pipe production capacity and strengthen its position on the international seamless pipes market.

Rustavi Steel products are the quality standard for the Georgian market and are exported to the European Union, the USA, Russia and Middle East, as well as Armenia, Azerbaijan and Turkey.