According to the reports, India’s Steel Authority of India Ltd (SAIL) proposes to set up a 3 MnT steel plant in Odisha on the land near Paradip port which was earlier embarked for South Korea’s steel giant POSCO. The total estimated investment in the same is about INR 20,000 crore and the company plans to produce high-end flat products in the new plant.
The company’s chairman Anil Kumar Chaudhary plans to appeal to the Odisha government to give 2,000-2,500 acres of land to set up a steel plant in the state. The key reason as cited by the SAIL’s management to set up a plant near Paradip port is the proximity to the coast that will save its cost of production as none of the SAIL’s five integrated steel plants are located near the coast which results in higher cost of transportation to the company as compared to its peers.
The Odisha government had acquired around 2,700 acres of land at Jagatsinghpur, which is about 10 km away from Paradip port for POSCO’s proposed plant. Out of the acquired land, the state government had handed over 1,700 acres land to Posco. The South Korean major, however, abandoned the 12-mtpa project for want of raw material linkages.
In Sep’18, JSW Steel has already acquired some part of the land from the Odisha government to set up a 10 MnT steel plant.
SAIL-Arcelor Mittal Joint Venture
Apart from the proposed steel plant in Odisha, in Dec’17 SAIL’s board had also approved the proposal to enter into a joint venture with the world’s largest steelmaker ArcelorMittal for manufacturing high-end automotive steel. However, definitive agreements in this regard are yet not finalised. According to the market sources, SAIL’s management has written to the Arcelor Mittal to expedite the process of signing the definitive agreement so that the work on the same can be started as early as possible.
The place at which the JV unit will be set up has not been finalised yet. However, the three states that are being considered are Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Odisha. In fact in Jun’18, the Odisha government has invited SAIL-Arcelor Mittal JV to set up the plant in the state as SAIL already has its unit in Rourkela with 4.5 MnT of hot metal and 4.2 MnT of crude steel capacity.
Leave a Reply