JSW Steel`s United Coal purchase in August

JSW steel on Sunday said that it is likely to complete the acquisition of US-based United Coal next month.

“We are in talks with the company officials and the bidding process is on. We hope to finalise the deal by August,” Vice-Chairman and Managing Director of the comoany Sajjan Jindal said.

United Coal is a privately-held metallurgical coal company that owns mines in Virginia and Kentucky. The company has a total reserves of 165 million metric tonne.

The market has widely speculated that the deal is expected to cost anywhere between $1.5-2 billion. Confident of clinching the deal from six other bidders, Jindal said, “We will be quite aggressive to acquire United Coal.”

JSW Steel has also set its sights on acquiring a coal mine in Australia.

“Apart from United Coal, we are looking at Australia for acquiring coal mines,” Jindal said but declined to give further details. JSW Steel is aiming to increase its capacity to 32 million tonne by 2020 from 4.8 million tonnes now.

The company is working on increasing the capacity of its Vijaynagar plant in Karnataka to 6.8 million tonne by September this year and to 10 million tonne per year by March 2010. It is also doubling capacity of the Salem plant to two million tonnes.