Portland’s Oregon Steel Mills has signed a purchase agreement with Russian steelmaker Evraz Group SA. The successful sale will mean that the Moscow-based giant has achieved the largest-ever Russian takeover of a U.S. company, Bloomberg.com reported on Monday.

Oregon Steel, one of the most diversified steel manufacturers in North America, has had a successful year. Oregon stock has more than doubled in the past year, closing last Friday at $58.96 per share. (Evraz bid $63.25 per share for all of the company.) Oregon has also completed most of the construction on a new spiral weld mill in Portland to further increase its production capacity. The company produces large-diameter pipes for oil and gas transport as well as other steel products.

Evraz Chief Financial Officer Pavel Tatyanin said the transaction gives Evraz an inside track on “one of the largest and most mature markets in the world,” where processed-steel prices are 30 percent higher than in Russia. He added that Oregon’s forte, pipe-making, is “an attractive business to be in,” saying that the company is considering increasing its pipeline-making capacity even further once the acquisition is finalized.

Adding Oregon to the Evraz-controlled stable of companies will increase output by 21 percent, according to the Bloomberg report, and will make Evraz the largest producer of railroad products worldwide. The 21 percent increase in overall steel production will propel it past Germany’s ThyssenKrupp, currently the number-10 steel producer in the world.

According to Roger Nightingale of Millennium Global Investments in London, the takeover is another indication that steel-making in the United States and other developed countries may soon be a thing of the past. “I suspect we’ll end up with no First World steel companies eventually,” Nightingale said, pointing to cheap loans and inexpensive labor enjoyed by Second and Third World companies as a reason First World steelmakers find it hard to compete.

The Bloomberg report also stated that international Russian business has been hampered in the past due to its exclusion from the World Trade Organization. However, Moscow cleared its last membership hurdle on Sunday when it won U.S. approval to join the wto at a meeting between President Bush and President Putin.

To learn more about foreign corporate takeovers and the dangers that underlie them, read “Germany’s Corporate Blitzkrieg,” “Selling Britain’s Corporate Crown Jewels,” and “Canada’s Corporate Sell-Out.”