Not so keen on any other new acquisitions: Tata Steel CEO

NEW DELHI: Tata Steel - which is in an expansion mode in India - is not so keen on any other new acquisitions, the company CEO TV Narendran has said.

The statement from Narendran has come amid Vedanta Ltd reviewing and evaluating its steel and steel-making raw materials businesses. In June, Vedanta said it will immediately begin the review and evaluate a broad range of options including potential strategic sale of some or all of its steel businesses.

“Not so keen on any other new acquisitions... We don’t need it,” Narendran said in a reply to a question on his company’s interest in buying Vedanta’s steel business. There is a lot to do at Tata Steel’s existing sites, he added. The company has a plan to scale up its annual installed steel making capacity to 40 million tonnes per annum (MTPA) by 2030 in India, from around 22 MTPA at present. In June 2018, Vedanta Limited acquired Jharkhand-based steel company ESL Steel Limited through an insolvency resolution process. The company set up a green field integrated manufacturing facility, which is currently commissioned at a capacity of 2.5 MT per annum. Speaking on Tata Steel UK operations, Narendran, who is also the MD of the company, said “we are (still) engaged with the UK government to find a solution. If we can find a common ground with the government (there).”

There is no problem in the UK. The production is not affected. The only challenge is the upstream assets are old and reliability of the equipment is sometimes not so great, he said.

India-headquartered Tata Steel owns the UK’s largest steelworks at Port Talbot in South Wales and employs around 8,000 people across all its operations in the country. The company had sought 1.5 billion pounds from the UK government to execute its decarbonisation plans. However, the British government earlier this year made a counter offer which was much lower to the company’s expectations.