Abstract. High Strength Steel grades are indispensable for the development of heavy-duty constructions and components with high specific strength. In these applications, a profound understanding of the plastic material behavior up to fracture is required to assess the structural integrity through numerical simulations. In this paper, we investigate the plastic behavior of S700 with a nominal thickness of 12 mm. The steel production process of a hot rolled, heavy gauge material inherently results in a through-thickness variation of the mechanical properties: i) solidification of the continuously cast slab starts from the outer surface, causing a gradient of the chemical composition across the thickness, ii) subsequent thermomechanical controlled rolling results in a variation of microstructure and texture over the thickness. To enhance the predictive accuracy of numerical simulations, we are examining the manifestation of this inhomogeneity across a range of plasticity experiments.