A success built on steel and Chinese investment

For 20 years, Svetlana Radosavljevic has monitored the manufacture of steel and iron from a glass-walled control room in an old production center at Zelezara Smederevo, Serbia's biggest mill.

For many years, the mill, less than a 60-minute drive from Belgrade, could only run one of its two production lines, and it lost about $10 million a month. Moreover, many of the 5,000 workers were unproductive. These factors resulted in a prolonged period of low productivity that almost forced the company into bankruptcy.