Tisco Close To Finalising Gopalpur Contract

SMS of Germany and Japanese majors Kawasaki and Hitachi have emerged as the front-runners for bagging the mandate for setting up Tata Steel's cold rolling mill in Gopalpur, Orissa.

A final decision in this regard will be taken in April after Nippon Steel, the technical consultants for the CRM project, submits its evaluation report to the Tata Steel board.

Italian major Danieli had also bid for setting up the plant but it is now believed to have fallen out of contention. Company sources still have not ruled out the possibility of including one or two other international majors in the shortlist.

 

"The mandate will be announced in April by when all statutory clearances are expected to be in place," Tata Steel sources said.

"We will talk to a few more leading companies in the coming weeks and see whether we can widen our choice of equipment supplier," he added.

The Rs 1,800-crore project will have a capacity of 1.2 million tonnes.

The cold rolling mill will be a division of Tata Steel and not a separate company. Though financing for the project is yet to be finalised, company sources said it will be met through internal accruals and debt.

The issue of fresh equity shares has almost entirely been ruled out by the company's board, particularly in the light of the dull capital market.

Civil work for the cold rolling mill will begin from June this year and the project is expected to go on stream by early 1992.

The entire land acquisition will be completed by May this year. Tata Steel will require a total of 5,000 acres for the 10 million tonnes integrated project at Gopalpur of which it has already acquired about 2,000 acres.

The hot rolled inputs for the cold rolling mill will be sourced from the company's hot strip mill at Jamshedpur.

The capacity of the hot strip mill is being doubled to 2 million tonnes as part of the company's Phase IV modernisation and scheduled for completion in late 1998.

The additional 1 million tonne capacity will be transferred to Gopalpur.

Power for the cold rolling mill will be sourced from Gridco. Tata Steel has also made provisions for generation of power internally. This, however, will only be a small portion of the division's require