site.btaNov. 5, 1963: Unveiling of Kremikovtzi Steel Complex

On November 5, 1963, Kremikovtzi Steel Complex was officially unveiled. The chief designer of the plant was the State Institute for Design of Iron and Steel Plants of the USSR in Moscow.

"Three summers ago, at the behest of its Communist Party and with fraternal Soviet help, the working hand of the people laid here in the middle of a barren field the foundation stone of a plant such as had not yet been built on Bulgarian soil. Its name became a symbol of the all-round socialist rise of the motherland," wrote the Bulgarian News Agency at the time. Bulgarian communist leader Todor Zhivkov cut the ribbon at the official opening.

In 1989 Kremikovtzi AD became a state-owned company, after which it was privatized in 1999, with the Ministry of Economy and Energy retaining a minority stake.

Once Bulgaria's largest metalworking company, Kremikovtzi AD was declared insolvent by the Sofia City Court in 2008. The company owed more than BGN 1.6 billion to creditors at the time. Gas supply, the main fuel for the factory's operation, was cut off a year later.

In 2011, Eltrade LTD bought the factory at a price of BGN 316 million as the only participant in a public tender. Later in the same year Bessian Management Limited, a company registered in the British Virgin Islands, purchased Eltrade.  As of January 2024, the operations are managed by a receiver.

In a 2015 monitoring report on the restructuring of the steel industry in Bulgaria, the European Commission points to a lack of capital for investment in modernization and a lack of working capital as the main reasons for the company's failure to achieve viability.