Usha Martin hopeful of getting offers for its steel business

Speciality steel-maker Usha Martin, which has decided to explore the sale of its steel business, is hopeful of receiving offers from bidders by end of this month after the company entered into non-disclosure agreement with steel giants, an official said on Tuesday.

"The process of due diligence is on and hopefully, within this month, we should be receiving offers," Managing Director Rajeev Jhawar said.

Steel giants, including Tata Steel, Vedanta, JSW, Liberty House and Kalyani Steel have signed non-disclosure agreements with it, he said after the company's Annual General Meeting here.

The company, which has been reeling under a debt burden, had decided to look for buyers for its steel business to achieve the "objective of deleveraging the company".

According to its latest annual report, its steel business achieved a sales turnover of Rs 2,626.43 crore in the 2017-18 as against Rs 2,253.11 crore in the previous year, higher by 16.57 per cent.

During FY 2017-18 the export turnover of steel business was Rs 96.2 crore, which was 3.66 per cent of its turnover, against Rs 102.8 crore in the previous year. Steel contributed 63.35 per cent of its total revenue during 2017-18 as compared to 62.48 per cent during 2016-17.

It makes alloy steel long products such as wire rods, bars, blooms and bright bars mostly for commercial vehicles and tractors.

The company had earlier planned to sell its wire rope business but did not succeed so far. "Our endeavour to address the debt burden of the Company by looking for a buyer for our wire and wire ropes business has not met with success so far," he said in the Annual report.

As on March 31, 2018, it total debt stood at Rs 4,600 crore. The company had repaid close to Rs 540 crore in the last financial year, and is looking to repay close to Rs 320 crore this fiscal, an official said.

However, lenders led by the State Bank of India, had pushed the board of directors of the company to remove Prashant Jhawar from the post of non-executive chairman.

The board had, subsequently, appointed G.N.Bajpai as the non-executive chairman of the firm.

Prashant and Rajeev Jhawar are in legal battles at the Kolkata bench of the National Company Law Tribunal over the control of the company.

When asked about the progress on settlement of legal disputes with co-promoter, he said, the focus would be firstly to 'set the company on track'.

--IANS

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