At the company’s announcement of its 2015 financial year results in August, Mr O’Malley said $200 million in cuts needed to be found to keep the Port Kembla steelworks open.

The final stage in this process was reached on Tuesday when workers at BlueScope voted to accept their enterprise agreements.

At Thursday’s AGM in Sydney, Mr O’Malley said there was a chance the cost cuts would tally more than $200 million.

“The Port Kembla management teams have developed and implemented a ‘game-changing’ approach to reducing more than $200 million in costs leading into financial year 2017,” Mr O’Malley said.

“We have made progress more quickly than expected on the cost reductions within our control and may in fact in this area – a necessary requirement given steel prices continue to fall.”

Mr O’Malley praised the co-operation of workers, unions and the government in achieving the cost reduction target and believed it placed the company in a good position going forward.

“The commitments made to permanently reduce costs mean the company is now leveraged to the upside of a future return to improved steel market spreads,” he said.

“Steelmaking is a cyclical business and at some point we expect the cycle to turn back in our favour.”

However, he said to keep making steel “we must remain cost competitive and continue to deliver value”.

Mr O’Malley said the company expected returns to be 40 per cent higher in the first half of the 2016 financial year, as compared to the second half of the 2015 year.

However he said market conditions and other factors could place pressure on the company’s profit margins in the second half of the 2016 financial year.