JSW Steel cuts Rs 35,000 cr investment by 1/3rd

Faced with a liquidity crunch, the country's second largest private steel producer, JSW Steel, is cutting its proposed investment by nearly one-third for the first phase of the Rs 35,000-crore mega steel project in West Bengal.

In November last year, the company had laid the foundation stone for the 10-MTPA greenfield steel project at Salboni in the state and said that the first phase with three million tonne capacity would come up at a cost of Rs 10,000-12,000 crore.

"The total cost of the first phase of the project now stands at Rs 4,000 crore, of which Rs 2,700 crore will be in the form of debt," JSW Group CFO Seshagiri Rao told PTI.

The company, which is anticipating lower profit in the third quarter of the present fiscal, was finding it tough to attain financial closure for its greenfield expansion projects due to liquidity crunch amid the economic slowdown.

"We have approached banks and expect to secure finances for the first phase of Bengal project by the end of this quarter. We have not attained financial closure yet," he said.

In the first phase of the West Bengal project, the company would set up a beneficiation unit to refine iron ore, a pellet plant and develop captive coal and iron ore blocks allocated to the firm.

The steel major had planned to produce 32 million tonnes of steel by 2020, with an investment of Rs 10,00,000 crore, which according to the industry observers could be a tough task.

"The company is likely to commission 10-MTPA by 2020 now instead of the targeted time-frame of 2012," an analyst said.

Apart from putting up a plant in West Bengal, the company plans to set up a mega greenfield steel plant in Jharkhand and increase the Vijaynagar plant capacity to 10 million tonnes a year.

Following a fall in steel prices and slump in demand, JSW Steel had cut its production by 20 per cent in October. However, the firm today said that it had revived the capacity of its mills to their full as it sees demand of the commodity picking up in the coming few months.

"Our plants are working at full capacity now," he said.

The company also asserted it would commission the three MTPA extended line at its 3.8-MTPA Vijaynagar plant in Karnataka by Feb-end.

Steel demand declined about 30-40 per cent as user industries, including automobile, reduced their offtakes amid the economic downturn. Prices of the commodity also plummeted about 50 per cent to $550 a tonne than mid-2008 levels following the slackening demand.