although a number of small steel ma

although a number of small steel manufacturing plants have opened in the past 20 years, most of the world's steel is still produced in very large steel mills. in these steel mills, it is econnomical to produed steel only in large batches. Because of the high cost of reconfiguring machinery, a steel mill set up to create one type of steel requires siqnificant time and money to change over to produce another type of steel . TO minimize these changeover costs, steel mills produce steel producets in large batches to meet estimated demand rather than actual orders. Because production quantities are designed to meet estimated demand instead of actual demand, steel mills often have overproduction of more than S4 billion and 14,000 employees, solved this problem in the past by sending faxes to potential buyers of their excess production. Buyers would respond with a bid on the product in which they were interested, and Bethlehem would negotiate with them to determine price and delivery terms.