Major steel producers, including JSW Steel and Kalyani
Steel, showed little interest in buying iron ore during the fourth round of
e-auction due to a massive increase in prices.
Prices went up by 45-50 per cent during the two-day auctions
that ended on Saturday and touched a high of Rs 3,900/MT as against the base
price of Rs 2,750.
The Supreme Court-appointed monitoring committee had
facilitated 876,000 tonnes of iron ore with a Fe grade of 55 to 67 per cent for
this round of auction. Steel companies picked up 364,000 tonnes, or 41.5 per
cent, of this.
Of the total 364,000 MT, 44,000 MT came from NMDC. JSW
Steel, Kalyani Steel, Mukand Steel, BMM Ispat and MSPL Ltd were the major
buyers.
Iron ore-starved JSW Steel, which requires 45,000 tonnes of
the material a day to run its 10-million tonne steel plant at Toranagal in
Bellary, picked up just 76,000 tonnes. Kalyani Steel managed to buy 20,000
tonnes.
“The prices of high-grade iron ore have hit a peak of Rs
6,800 per tonne, showing a rise of about 80 per cent, during the auctions, as
buyers were desperate to buy ore. However, transporting the ore to our steel
plant is still a big problem, as the department of mines and geology is still
to fast-track the process of issuing e-permits,” said R K Goyal, managing
director, Kalyani Steel.
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