Mckinsey Pens New Rejig For Tata Steel, 12 Arms

McKinsey & Co has drafted a new restructuring proposal for Tata Steel and its 12 operating subsidiaries. The report has set out a course of action for Tata Steel on reorganising its dozen-odd subsidiaries, all of which are into niche steel and engineering businesses.

J J Irani, managing director of Tata Steel, said: "We will work on the basis of the recommendations which broadly identified the companies that we should grow and the ones we should divest from."

Irani said, "We are having discussions with the chief executives of the subsidiaries for giving final touches to the scheme."

He, however, declined to reveal the names of the companies which would be divested and the ones that will remain.

"We are trying to complete the restructuring process at the earliest," he added, without giving any time-frame.

As a result of the revamp, the two-year back proposal to reduce some four subsidiaries into TRF Ltd and make it the allied engineering flagship has been dropped.

Other senior Tata officials said this was because some of the engineering companies that were to be merged with TRF could now be put on the block. All of them had even taken shareholders approval and the merger was awaiting court clearances.

The recast of Tata Steel and its subsidiaries was first proposed almost a decade back, but it never made progress apart from the Tata's exit from Tata Timken. In the tapered roller bearings firm, the group had sold its entire holding to Timken of the US.

Also, Tata SSL has now become a wholly owned subsidiary and will be merged into Tata Steel. So long, the hindrance has been the presence of multinational partners in some of the companies that was making merging them with other stronger group companies difficult.

A large number of the Tata Steel subsidiaries has been languishing through the 1990s because of the recession and several are yet to recover and have even been referred to the Board for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction.

The subsidiaries that are remaining are: Tata Refractories, Tinplate Co, Tata Sponge Iron, Tata Metaliks, Tata-Yodogawa, Tata Construction & Projects, Ipitata Refractories, TRF, Tata Pigments, Tata Material Handling, Stewarts & Lloyds, Tata Technodyne and Tata Korf.