News El 6 Chelyabinsk

El 6 Group, the EAEU’s largest producer of graphite and carbon-based products, has launched a fully integrated manufacture to produce high-density, high-strength graphite products. The manufacture chain covers all stages, starting with raw materials. Its pilot products made from this type of graphite are crystallizers and graphite stirrers. The pilot batches were produced for Kamensk-Uralsky Metallurgical Plant. Both products were successfully tested and will be added to the El 6’s portfolio and they are also planned for inclusion in the export program. In the future, the range of high-density graphite components will be expanded.

High-density, high-strength graphite products are used primarily in non-ferrous metallurgy. For example, graphite stirrers are needed for degassing units that remove dissolved gases and non-metallic inclusions from liquid metal during Al-Cu refining processes. Meanwhile, crystallizers are used for continuous casting machines, manufacture of wire rods, circles/rounds, pipes, and other profiles from non-ferrous metals. 

“We are actively working towards import substitution of key components for Russian industry. It's critical to understand the context: for a long time, only crystallizers and stirrers made of imported graphite have been available in Russia. We in fact pioneer a one hundred percent independent manufacture cycle to produce such components selecting the most suitable graphite from the El 6’s line of structural graphite products. It should be noted that El 6 currently produces 16 grades of structural graphite. At our request, our colleagues in metallurgy have done LMF tests in an aggressive environment to prove the high performance and reliability of our stirrers. The crystallizers were also tested in real-world industrial environments with perfect results. This kind of verification by the market is really important,” said Sergey Ushakov, CEO of El 6 Group.

According to Sergey Ushakov, expanding the products line to ensure import substitution in non-ferrous metallurgy is the company's key priority for 2026.

As a reminder, in Q4 2025, El 6 Group will start industrial deliveries of a new line of 750-mm diameter needle coke graphite electrodes. These are the largest electrodes for electric arc furnaces existing in Russia. So, the Russian manufacturer has joined the world’s top 5 producers with a full line of graphite electrodes with diameters from 75 mm to 750 mm in the product portfolio.