December 02, 2008

Essar Steel to expand steel service center capacity in India

Essar Steel announced the augmentation of its steel service center capacity in India to 2 million tonnes from the current 1.2 million tonnes at Hazira in Gujarat to meet the growing demand for ready to use steel.

Essar is in the process of setting up three Service Centers at the Auto clusters in Chennai, Pune and the NCR Region to support its growing presence in the Automobile and appliance sectors. Each service center would add 250,000 tonnes per annum capacity. The service centre at Chennai is expected to become operational in third quarter of the current fiscal and the remaining two in the last quarter.

Each Steel Service Center will have the capacity to slit coils to narrow widths and cut them to the desired blank size and to process cold rolled and hot rolled products and provide steel in sheet sizes as per requirements of the end users. The lines have been designed to handle cold rolled, hot rolled and galvanized steel for its target segments of automobile and appliances. The equipment is designed to meet the most stringent requirements of slit edge, burr, length tolerance, table top flatness and surface inspection. This processing capability is being backed by ERP implementation of SAP and i2.

The move is seen as a logical extension of the “Go Retail” buzzword at Essar today and the desire of the company to be as close to end consumers of its products as is possible.