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The first warehouse of the company J. Soares Correia – Armazéns de Ferro was located in Vila Nova de Gaia, on the ground floor of the house where the family that founded the company in the year 1907 lived.
With a family structure, the iron company went through the vicissitudes inherent to a century of existence, in which it followed a trajectory that took it from the modest eighth place in iron sales in the north of the country, in the middle of the century, to a situation of market leadership, where it has remained for about three decades.
After the inevitable dispersion of capital, typical of a family organisation that was already in its fourth generation, in 1998 the Correia Santos branch acquired all the capital from the remaining heirs and concentrated the destiny of the company, which thus gained a new generation of entrepreneurs.
The first warehouse was supported by a reduced administrative and commercial structure, with about seven employees, appropriate to a little developed market, in which all the iron was imported, namely from France, Germany and Belgium, until the creation of Siderurgia Nacional in 1960, which changed this panorama.
At that time, construction still absorbed very small quantities of iron and this material was used for rural purposes, such as the rims for the wheels of ox carts, for the buckets of the norias or for the spouts that collected resin in the pine forests. It is curious that it was also in ox carts that the iron was transported to the first warehouses of the company: after being unloaded from the barges, at the Gaia quay, it was these vehicles which guaranteed the steep ascent up to rua de Soares dos Reis.
The distribution of iron was, for most of the 20th century, done by rail, to the interior of the country, until the acquisition of the first vehicle, an Opel Blitz, which the current owner still remembers. Signs of a bygone era when the human arm ensured practically all tasks, which changed with the introduction of adequate equipment, such as the first travelling crane, at the end of the 1960s, whose installation proved so efficient that it was followed by a series of others that contributed to the development of the company and a significant improvement in working conditions.
In 1987 the company already held a market position that led to its listing on the stock exchange, following an IPO of 25% of the capital. The steel products market is today dominated by J. Soares Correia – Armazéns de Ferro S.A., which expanded its activity through the acquisition of companies in the same area, particularly “M.Cardoso” and “José Pinto Magalhães” (in 1987) and “FerroBeiras” and “Transferro” (in 1990).
In a strategy of gradual expansion and national coverage, structures were created in Guarda, Palmela, Maia and Vila Real. The year 2000, when the headquarters and main warehouse were centralised in Maia, was a milestone in this evolution. Today, the companies of the group, certified in 2003 by ISO 9001:2000, manage 100,000 m2 of facilities, a fleet of 30 heavy vehicles and an evolved technology, namely in the Information Systems, in the areas of handling and lifting of loads and the cutting line. About twenty years ago, it was said that the company had sold enough iron to build not one but many Eiffel Towers.
Now, on this centenary, as a tribute to J. Soares Correia, we can state that the bridges of this iron landscapes, and many others, could well have come out of the company’s warehouses, such is the quantity of iron already commercialised up to the present.
The scope of our QMS is as follows:
Commercialisation and Distribution of Steel Products (Concrete Rod, Profiles, Commercial Bars and Plate in coil or standard or made-to-measure) and other Non-Steel Products (Pipe, Mesh-Sun, Nails, Wire, Nets, Sandwich Panel).
Pre-Moulding of Steel Beams and Production of Steel Reinforcements for Reinforced Concrete.
