After Geneva Steel executives illustrated the state of the company using colorful graphs and charts during its annual business meeting, a shareholder wanted to know one thing:

What's being done to pep up the value of its sagging stock.Geneva CEO and Chairman Joe Cannon's answer was predictable, or at least the inquisitive stockholder thought so.

"The only thing that's going to help our stock price is the bottom-line performance of the company," Cannon said Tuesday at Geneva's shareholders meeting. The way to do that, he said, is to cut costs and push more steel through the mill.

Accomplishing that tall order might persuade investors to change their low opinions of the struggling Utah County steel company. "We have to convince Wall Street that we are going to be a viable company," Cannon said. Geneva stock is currently going for about $2.50 a share.

The shareholder, one of only a handful at the meeting in which company executives and directors outnumbered shareholders, said he heard the same thing at a previous meeting.

Cannon outlined a plan called "operational excellence" to pull Geneva out of the financial doldrums. The company aims to provide the lowest cost to customers with the least amount of inconvenience a la Southwest Airlines. It will attempt to produce and sell more of the mill's profitable steel products, reduce labor and administrative costs and lay off workers.

"More on that later, right?" Cannon said acknowledging Denny Kujala, president of United Steel Workers of America Local No. 2701 who was sitting with union colleagues in the audience.

Contract talks between the union and Geneva are under way and apparently going much more smoothly than they did three years ago when steel-workers conducted work slow-downs and threatened to strike.

Both sides are trying to bring trust back into a tattered relationship and are shooting for an agreement before the current contract expires March 31.

"We're up to our elbows in a lot of issues. Some of them will take some time to find solutions to," Kujala said.

Rank-and-file workers are paying close attention to the discussions. "People are anxious to see what kind of contract they're going to get," Kujala said.

The union wants a partnership agreement and employment security for approximately 2,100 union workers. Geneva told union officials it could probably safeguard about 1,400 jobs, meaning 700 people could be put out of work.

The union, Kujala said, could live with reducing the work force if the jobs are consumed through attrition rather than in one fell swoop.

Geneva is nearing the end of a "long and agonizing" plant modernization project that started in 1991, Cannon said.

"We've been basically doing brain surgery on ourselves at the same time we've been making steel," he said. "Some things are coming together to get more tons through the mill."

Geneva has undergone significant, sometimes painful, changes since its last shareholders meeting.

The company laid off 180 office and plant workers last month. It juggled responsibilities among senior administrators. Cannon took a more hands-on, man-about-the-plant management role. Plant supervisors that hadn't previously answered to Cannon now report directly to him.

Steel industry analysts speculated that Geneva's low stock prices and flimsy financial showing made it vulnerable to a takeover. The company set up a complicated corporate financial device to make it costly for a person or group to assume control of the plant by snapping up 15 percent or more of its low-priced stock.

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Geneva fell short of its own expectations for 1997.

A surge of foreign imports, soaring utility costs and operational difficulties combined to take a toll on Geneva's balance sheet. The company battled an unprecedented amount of imported plate steel, record-high winter natural gas prices, a problematic finishing mill upgrade and a railroad car shortage.

Geneva lost $1.3 million in fiscal 1997, nearly $6 million less than it lost the year before but continuing a trail of red ink for most of the 1990s.

The company did receive good news during the past year. U.S. International Trade Commission ruled in favor of Geneva's petition to sanction companies illegally "dumping" cut-rate foreign steel into U.S. markets. The decision limits the amount of plate steel Russia, Ukraine, China and South Africa can ship to the United States.

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