Boart Longyear has been around since the late 1800s. It's one of the world's leading providers of drilling services, drilling equipment and performance tooling to the mining and drilling companies.
Currently, the company is a subsidiary of an Australian parent company, but we're actually in the process of trying to re-domicile the company to Canada. The global drilling services division operates in 30 countries across the globe with a diverse mining customer base that includes copper, gold, nickel, zinc and other metals and minerals. We also sell our products to 100 countries across the globe. There are six manufacturing plants in our company, two of which are located in Canada. One of them is in Mississauga, and the other one is in North Bay. These two plants are key to our global supply force.
Boart Longyear has had a strong presence in Canada, in particular on the manufacturing side, and we've been manufacturing under these plants since the 1950s.
In Canada, we operate in seven locations, with approximately 1,000 employees across the country. This includes operations from the east to west coast: Calgary; Haileybury and a number of other locations throughout Ontario, including Sturgeon Falls and Sudbury; and Val-d'Or. Two plants are of key importance to us, given that the plant in North Bay manufactures 90% of our global supply for coring rods that are sold throughout the world. Our plant in Mississauga is the sole source for the long hole production rods that are manufactured in that facility.
We have about 71 employees in the Mississauga plant, which also includes some corporate office space. We have everything from engineering to legal finance and IT in that plant. We currently have only 46 employees dedicated to the manufacturing, given that the impact of the tariffs has reduced demand for our product. As noted on the slide, the 2018 projected use of steel is 2.8 thousand tons, whereas the capacity is 10 thousand. We are at one-third of what our total possible production is out of that plant.
Prior to the tariffs being put in place, we sourced the material for the Mississauga plant from suppliers that had distribution points in the United States. We used to receive daily truck deliveries that were just in time from these locations, which allowed us to keep low levels of inventory and reduce our cost base. Because of the tariffs, we've had to modify our flow of materials, and we are now getting these directly from Europe. They are coming directly by sea and land transportation to our plant in Mississauga. This, however, has created the need to have significant, additional inventory on hand at our Mississauga location at a significant cost, which impacts the cost of our product.