Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

Prepared for Baudoin Sorrell · GravitHy · August 2026
A read of your market, built without asking you for anything first. Low carbon iron is not sold to a long list. It is sold into a small, named population where two very different roles have to agree, and where some of the most useful early conversations happen with companies that will never buy a ton from you. This covers where those roles sit across Europe, and roughly how many there are. It describes the market rather than your business, and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
European steel producers
The direct users of low carbon metallics, and the segment where the decision is made against a per ton price that already has an incumbent behind it. Worth being straight about the shape: this is a short list of large sites rather than a long list of companies, so the work is depth per account, not volume.
Who signs: raw materials and metallics purchasing, the plant or works manager, the chief procurement officer, and the head of decarbonization on anything with a carbon claim attached.
Roughly 500
steel production sites across 22 EU member states, upstream and downstream combined; the electric arc furnace subset is published separately and is smaller again
Announced conversion projects
Producers that have publicly committed to moving off the blast furnace route. Each one creates a metallics gap it has to fill before first production, and each one is run by a named project organization with its own budget and its own timeline, separate from the parent company's day to day purchasing.
Who signs: the project or program director, the group decarbonization lead, corporate strategy, and the finance lead who signs a long term supply commitment.
Roughly 20 to 40
European conversion and direct reduction projects, tracked one public announcement at a time; no register holds them, so the list is assembled by hand and goes stale quickly
Foundries and independent metallics buyers
The layer below the mills, buying pig iron and metallics on shorter cycles and in smaller lots. Individually small, collectively large, and rarely worked by a sales motion built for mill scale offtake. Many are family held, which shortens the decision chain considerably.
Who signs: the purchasing manager, the technical or metallurgical director, the plant manager, and at family held groups the owner.
Several thousand plants
European foundries, counted by plant in trade association data rather than by owning company, so the true number of buying entities is lower than the plant count
Downstream vehicle and equipment manufacturers
Not your direct customer, and often the reason your direct customer moves. When a manufacturer commits to low carbon material in its own supply chain, that commitment travels upstream to whoever supplies its steel. These names are reachable years before an offtake conversation is realistic.
Who signs: chief purchasing officer, the raw material or commodity buyer, head of sustainability, and the supply chain director.
Roughly 15 to 20
vehicle manufacturing groups with European production, plus several hundred tier one suppliers of scale behind them
Large European industrial buyers with published carbon commitments
The wider demand signal. Construction products, appliances, energy equipment and infrastructure contractors all publish emissions targets they cannot meet without changing what their steel is made from. Which of them have made a steel specific commitment is not enumerated anywhere, so this segment is qualified one company at a time.
Who signs: group procurement director, sustainability director, head of supply chain, and the technical specification owner.
53,000 to 56,000
EU enterprises at 250 or more people across all sectors; the subset carrying a published steel related commitment is a small fraction of it and is identified by hand

Where the openings are

1
Two buyers sign one contract, and they rarely meet. The metallics buyer prices your product per ton against scrap and imported material. The decarbonization or strategy owner buys the carbon number and the exposure that comes with not having one. Outreach that reaches only the first stalls on price. Outreach that reaches only the second stalls at procurement. A reachable list has to carry both roles inside the same account, deliberately.
2
The pull sits downstream of your buyer. A vehicle or equipment manufacturer that commits to low carbon material moves its steel supplier's hand for it. That makes the reachable population wider than the plant list above, and it means some of the most useful conversations are with companies that will never buy a ton from you directly.
3
Offtake is decided years before first metal, which makes this a scheduling problem. A fixed named list, a recorded reason behind every not yet, and a date to come back. That work is mechanical and it runs continuously. Announcements and trade events reach the market when you have news. A named channel reaches it when the buyer has a reason, and those two calendars are not the same one.
Built from public market data, counts banded deliberately. Site counts come from the steel industry's own published figures and include downstream processing, so they overstate the number of buying entities. Project counts are assembled from public announcements rather than from a register. Foundry figures count plants, not owners. Enterprise counts come from published European business statistics and describe companies by size band only.
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