WL Ross & Co

WL Ross & Co is a private equity company founded and based in New York by Wilbur Ross in April 2000. The company focuses on investments in financially distressed companies with undervalued stocks, in the $100 to $200 million range, usually in the United States, Asia, Korea, Ireland, Japan, France and China. By acquiring majority stake in their investments through purchases and/or buyouts, WL Ross & Co. LLC then have the option of restructuring, turnarounds, mergers, reorganizations and industry consolidation. Starting in 2002, WL Ross began acquiring the assets of bankrupt steel companies such as LTV Steel Corp, Bethlehem Steel, Weirton Steel, Acme Steel, Georgetown Steel, Youngstown Sheet and Tube, and Republican Steel. By 2003 Ross had established relationships with the United Steelworkers, promising to save jobs. WL Ross founded the company International Steel Group (ISG) by combining bankrupt LTV Corp., Acme Steel and Bethlehem Steel, which quickly became the largest integrated steel company in the United States and was a Fortune 500 company by 2005.

In April 2005, WL Ross sold ISG to Luxembourg-based Mittal Steel, the largest steel company in the world, for $4.5 billion, half in cash and half in stock. Mittal had been acquiring and merging with companies since 1989 under the tenure of President and CEO, Lakshmi Mittal. On February 25, 2005, Reuters reported that Mittal planned on cutting up to 45,000 steel workers' jobs from 2005 to 2010 in the United States.

Since 2006, WL Ross & Co. LLC, has been operating as a wholly owned subsidiary of Invesco Ltd, an American investment management company headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, with Ross as CEO and which operates under WL Ross brand names, among others.