Tata Steel to decide on UK long product unit in 4-5 months

Yuan devaluation to hurt the July-September quarter

Tata Steel will be taking a strategic decision regarding the UK long-product division in the next four-five months. "We are looking for other buyers for this unit and also considering other options like resizing the business," Koushik Chatterjee, group executive director-finance, told reporters after the company's annual general meeting held here on Wednesday.

Last week, the company in its statement said its talks with the Klesh Group to sell the UK unit have discontinued after almost a year of negotiations.

Regarding the import duty hike on select metals, Tata Steel management said the duty will deter a lot of speculative imports but does not save the industry and the impact would be more sentiment based.

The finance ministry on wednesday raised import duty on select metals by 2.5 per cent.

"There needs to be more structural changes for the steel industry on the safe guard and anti-dumping front," said Chatterjee.

Regarding iron ore supply for the company's Jamshedpur plant, T V Narendra, managing director Tata Steel India and South East Asia, said,"Currently the company is sourcing the ore from Odisha mines, and, since ore prices have declined, the company may look to source ore locally instead of importing."

Tata Steel's Jharkhand iron ore mines have stopped dispatches to the steel plant over issues of challan with the state government.

Chatterjee said the company's realisations in the September quarter will get affected due to yuan devaluation when compared sequentially, just as it got affected sequentially in the quarter ended June.

China devalued its currency by two per cent on Tuesday, which makes Chinese exports cheaper. For the steel industry across the globe, cheap Chinese imports have been a big problem for quite some time now and with devaluation the industry may suffer further.