Investing 7 billion won in the upgrade of annual annealing capacity by 110,000 tons with a timetable for completion by April 2005 Hankook Metal Ind., a maker of cold-rolled steel products, reportedly signed a purchase contract with Ebner of Austria for 8 units of annealing furnaces to be installed at its Pohang Plant. With a total investment of 7 billion won in those facilities, Hanook Metal will become to increase its annealing capacity by 110,000 tons to 350,000 tons per year from the current 240,000 tons when the installment of new furnace is completed. With a large capability of annealing 90 tons of cold-rolled steel sheets at the maximum per charge at each furnace with hydrogen, Hankook metal is expected to ease its heavy workload in this field and to increase the output of high-grade high carbon steel. The manufacture of annealing furnaces is scheduled to begin soon and Hankook Metal is expecting that the new furnaces could go on-stream at its plant sometime between April and May next year, raising its monthly output capacity of cold-rolled and annealed steel products to 29,000 tons from the present level of 20,000 tons. In order to take the utmost advantage of being capable of producing wide-breadth cold-rolled steel sheets, it will have the new furnaces designed to anneal such products as well, according to the company. sunhong@snmnews.com