Gerdau
company
Gerdau S.A. is the largest producer of long steel in the Americas, and the 33rd largest steelmaker worldwide, with approximately 13 million tons of production in 2023. Gerdau uses mini mills, integrated mills, and direct reduced iron plants; 71% of the steel manufactured by the company is made from recycled scrap. In 2023, 39% of sales were to Brazil and 39% of sales were to North America.
Substantially all of the common shares of the company are owned by Jorge Gerdau Johannpeter and his family; however, non-voting preferred shares, representing a minority interest in the company, are publicly traded.
History
Gerdau was founded as the Pontas de Paris nail manufacturing business by João Gerdau, a German migrant who left the port of Hamburg for Rio Grande do Sul, in Brazil, in 1869 in search of new business opportunities.
He passed the business to his son, Hugo Gerdau, who, in 1946, passed it to his son-in-law Curt Johannpeter. After the end of World War II, the nail factory struggled to find raw material. To secure raw materials, the company acquired a steel mill in 1948. By the 1960s, the mill was at capacity and in 1967, the company acquired a minimill in São Paulo. In 1969, the company was renamed Metalúrgica Gerdau S.A. In 1970, the company became a public company via listings on the Rio de Janeiro Stock Exchange and São Paulo Stock Exchange.
“Gerdau” enters the record as company. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Gerdau and company can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1511043. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2023, 1869, 1946 and 1948.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gerdau” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.