Steel generations XII – Meet Claes Olsson

“I actually don’t know which generation of steelmakers I belong to. I grew up in a steel town in central Sweden. My mother and father both worked and also met in a steel mill in another steel town. My paternal grandfather was a farmer working in the fields during the summer and in a mine during the winter. This activity had been inherited over generations before him…

My brother left the small steel town in Sweden to work in Luxemburg, but not for a steel company. So for the moment, I’m the only person in the family working with steel. I’m working as a product manager for the Stainless products of ArcelorMittal Industeel in Le Creusot, France. I am the technical link between the customer and the mill.

My job is to understand what the customer needs and to translate that into a working steel grade, sometimes an existing one, or on occasion a new! When I was a student, I studied anything but materials: engineering physics and languages – German and Russian. But somehow, the contacts I had, made it easy to find challenges and interesting problems within the steel field.

The current situation is obviously very challenging. I have only been working for ArcelorMittal for a short time, so there are reasons for concern. Before I joined the Group, my career brought me to work in Sweden, Finland, Czechoslovakia (yes, it was a while ago, even before the Velvet Revolution) and Switzerland. This has not only given me a many friends, but also allowed me to work with people having different cultural backgrounds. This helps me to communicate, which is an essential part of my job.”
Publication date: June 25, 2009

Picture: Claes Olsson at the Expo Qatar in Doha at the end of April 2009