Steel prices to fall by $100/tn in coming qtrs: Experts

Vishal Agarwal, MD of Visa Steel informed that in their company, the pig iron business is back on stream, the furnace was taken down for relining. “So we didn’t have production from that in Q1 but Q2 we should get that. The coke and ferrochrome business continues to remain quite robust business for us. In Q1 we had a significant increase from Rs 72 crore to Rs 255 crore in the sales and profit after tax (PAT) grew from Rs 5 crore to about Rs 48.5 crore.”

Agarwal said, “We have to separate the commodities with regard to oil, with regard to non-ferrous, with regard to agri products and steel products. If you look at the iron and steel products, I think clearly there has been a significant increase in iron ore and coking coal prices. That has resulted in metallic prices and steel prices being extremely firm. So if I look at the outlook for this financial year, I do not see any softening happening in the prices for the iron and steel products.”

On Visa Steel’s aggressive plans in terms of backward integration both on iron ore, coal and even the coal front, Agarwal said, “We have a 54 million tonne block of coal in Orissa, which we hope to develop and benefits from that should probably accrue from FY10-FY11 onwards. We have all the metallic in place now with our pig iron plant, the coke oven plant, the ferrochrome plant, the sponge iron plant and the captive power plant. With these metallic in place, we have healthy revenue and profitability in the coming financial year. We are integrating into half a million tonne special in stainless steel plant, which will be one of the largest facilities in the country, which we expect to achieve by March 2010.”