A behind the scenes look… at our quarterly results

You can hardly read any press lately without hearing about the US Presidential results. But there are other results in the news… the Q3 financial results for ArcelorMittal. Have you ever wondered who prepares these figures? Did you know that a large number of ArcelorMittal people work around the clock to ensure that the results are prepared, translated, published and sent out on time? It isn’t as easy as it looks. Read more…

Tuesday November 4, 2008. ArcelorMittal Headquarters in Luxembourg. A team of around 30 people from Investor Relations, Finance, Communications and ‘the crème de la crème’ of our management, the Group Management Board, are getting ready for one of the big dates in our Company’s calendar: the presentation of our quarterly results.

Some of them have woken up early to come to Luxembourg. They know the day will be long… and the night even longer. Frenetic activity on the 3rd floor: in a company composed of over 1,500 entities, consolidating the financial figures is not an easy job! The task is a hard one, with a lot of things to do: the analyst presentation, the media presentation, the internal communication material… it’s not uncommon to see people in the corridors at 3am, sprinting to a printer which they hope will not be jammed!

Meetings, documents, validations, translators working around the clock in different points of Europe and Asia, cold pizza for dinner, showers in the office building… After an eventful night, the moment arrives: Wednesday at 7am CET – the 30-something page announcement gets published on the internet site, a special newsletter is sent to all ArcelorMittal people, webcasts for analysts and journalists will follow.

At the end of another long day, two things are sure and certain: 1 – there are few things as exciting and exhausting as working for one of the largest companies in the world. 2 – we all will have a night-long sleep…

Picture: Online Communications specialist Cathy Weber, preparing the html version of the results release that you can see on www.arcelormittal.com. For the results she witnesses 1 dawn and 2 sunsets from the office

Collaboration: Stefan Schwarz, Corporate Communications