Almost a year after it opened, Mississippi Silicon's new $200 million plant in Burnsville is expected to resume full production soon as it rebounds from an April fire, CFO John Lalley said Tuesday.
Currently, the facility is running at more than 90% of its installed capacity of 36,000 mt/year, Lalley said in an interview.
The fire "related to the mix system in one of the furnaces," he said. "We're working around it. We recovered pretty well from the fire, but we won't be back to 100% [production] until early in the fourth quarter."
The plant features two 24-MW furnaces. It began commissioning activities in September 2015 and started producing metal the following month.
Mississippi Silicon's production is sold out for 2016, adding it was too early to discuss potential 2017 sales, Lalley said.
"We are going through qualifications with just about everybody and have not had any problems yet," he said. The company targets a number of markets, including aluminum, chemicals and automotive.
The Burnsville plant, the first new silicon manufacturing facility in North America in four decades, is "tracking to our projections" of eventually having more than 200 full-time employees, Lalley said.
Mississippi Silicon is a subsidiary of Rima Industrial, one of the largest privately owned industrial groups in Brazil.
