MUMBAI (Reuters) - Tata Steel Ltd on Wednesday reported a 37 percent rise in quarterly net profit, as gains on land sales helped offset the impact of sluggish European demand on its bottom line.
Tata Steel, Europe's second-largest steelmaker, said consolidated net profit was 12.54 billion rupees ($204 million) for its second quarter to Sept. 30, up from 9.17 billion rupees a year earlier.
It racked up 11.5 billion rupees in one-off gains in the quarter from the sale of land in Mumbai.
Analysts had expected a net profit of 7.38 billion rupees, according to Thomson Reuters data. Sales for the quarter, however, fell 2.4 percent from a year earlier.
Tata Steel entered Europe through its $13 billion acquisition of Corus in 2007, just before financial crisis. It has since been forced to restructure operations and focus on higher-margin products to compete in a market where demand has yet to return to reach pre-crisis levels.
"In Europe we are increasingly concerned about the impact of rising imports, particularly from China, on EU steelmakers," Karl-Ulrich Köhler, Tata Steel's chief executive for Europe said in a statement. European steel processors tend to increase purchases of cheap steel from places like China and Russia when prices are attractive.
Tata Steel last month said it was in talks to sell loss-making European operations including mills in northern England and Scotland. It said on Wednesday that due diligence on the sale of that European long products business, which serves the construction and engineering industries, would continue into 2015.
Production and deliveries were higher in the second quarter from the previous three months, despite extended summer shutdowns, Tata Steel said in the statement.
($1 = 61.5000 rupees)
(Reporting by Aman Shah; Writing by Devidutta Tripathy; Editing by Clara Ferreira Marques)
