Willy Korf

Willy Korf

Willy Korf (born August 13, 1929 in Hamm (Sieg);

† November 21, 1990 in Innsbruck) was a German entrepreneur.

Life and work

In 1948 Korf started his family's building materials and agricultural goods wholesale business. He succeeded in expanding the company in the wood, building materials and hardware sectors in Baden-Baden. In the 1950s, Korf was successful with the production of spot-welded welded wire mesh in Kehl, which gave the impetus to found the Elektrostahlwerk Badische Stahlwerke AG in Kehl in the mid-1960s. In 1961, Korf had sold the wire mesh factory to the Klöckner Group for DM 20 million. In competition with the traditional steel groups in the Ruhr area, in Bavaria and Lower Saxony, the Badische Stahlwerke grew and were managed by Korf Industrie und Handel GmbH & Co. KG, which was designed as a holding.

Korf benefited from a boom in rebar, particularly in the US, to which he exported heavily. In 1969, Korf built the first steel mill using his modern process in Georgetown, SC, USA. He founded the Hamburger Stahlwerke[1], which dealt with the production of wire rod, before that he had become a shareholder in Internationale Baumaschinenfabrik AG Neustadt (IBAG). In 1974 Korf succeeded in acquiring the rights to the Midrex direct reduction process, which made him less dependent on the scrap supply. This is how the second direct reduction plant in the world, which is still producing, was built in Hamburg. In the wake of the steel crisis in the late 1970s, the company fell into crisis during the first oil price shock. The end of the rebar boom in the USA, which caused difficulties for the Georgetown plant, probably also contributed to the decline.

In 1981, Korf still produced 2.7 million tons of crude steel and achieved worldwide sales of DM 2.78 billion. Several companies in the Korf Group filed for a settlement. In 1983, the Badische Stahlwerke went bankrupt, but were saved by a state guarantee. Today, the BSW company is managed as a medium-sized company by the Seizinger and Weitzmann families. Born in India, Lakshmi Mittal later took over the Hamburger Stahlwerke.

Despite the collapse of his company, Korf founded Korf-Transport GmbH in 1985, with which he made a fresh start. Again Korf tried to realize the modern Midrex steelmaking process with the idea of ​​the smallest steelworks.

Korf died in a plane crash near Innsbruck in 1990.