For the past two months, Baosteel has been using forklift trucks to transport hot wide plate slab as material for its wide plate mill whose feeding device is now forced to be shut down for an update mission of adding a rough mill to the existing plate mill.

    Swedish Kalmar-origin DCD25025T forklift trucks were used this time to ferry each piece of hot slab measuring 15-ton in weight and a temperature of 1,100 degrees centigrade per 2.5 minutes round the clock. As of September 17, a total of 20,304 pieces of hot slab weighting some 29 tons had been fed to the plate mill through this way, marking the longest period of transporting hot bend via forklift truck in the world.