SAIL to Redirect Strategies toward Long-Term, Sustained Growth
09/17/2008 - Steel Authority of India Limited is reorienting its strategies to adapt to India’s changing steel landscape, according to SAIL Chairman S.K. Roongta, who says SAIL is decisively proceeding toward long-term sustained growth.
Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL) is reorienting its strategies to adapt to India’s changing steel landscape, according to SAIL Chairman S.K. Roongta speaking at the company's 36th Annual General Meeting this week. "The challenge of growth is well recognized," and SAIL is decisively proceeding toward long-term sustained growth, he told the company's shareholders attending the meeting.
Roongta said the company and the Indian steel industry has come "under the conflicting pressures of contending with sharply rising input costs, yet need to contain its product prices in order to check inflation.
“The industry has responded to the Government's concerns on steel price rise,” said Roongta. “However, with the country again becoming a net importer of steel, as a long-term solution it is imperative that new production capacities come up. Moderating prices in spite of substantial increases in input costs and yet maintaining margins to generate resources for further investments, is going to be a tough challenge for the steel players.”
Roongta believes that SAIL’s record turnover and profit, best-ever operating efficiency parameters and highest-ever production and sales—during 2007-08 as well as in the first quarter of the current financial year—reflect the success of the company's strategies, especially relating to improvement in equipment and labor productivity, aggressive cost cutting and jump-in value-added steel production.
SAIL's confidence about sustained growth in steel consumption in the country remains intact, in view of "the steel-intensive development being witnessed in the Indian economy and the major steel-consuming industrial sectors", he commented, and reiterated SAIL's plan to proceed with the ongoing modernization and expansion program to take hot-metal production capacity to 26 million tonnes.
Sharing at length the measures taken in this regard, Roongta told the company's shareholders that SAIL is strengthening its raw material security and distribution network, giving impetus to new business initiatives through collaborations and joint ventures, and developing new and superior grades of steel to provide enhanced value to customers. In addition to the various strategies being implemented for meeting SAIL's raw material needs, Roongta noted that the company has already started the process for development of a four-million-tonne per annum capacity coking coal block with captive washery at Tasra, as well as development of the Sitanala coking coal block.
