Reuters reported that India's stainless steel maker JSL Stainless Limited's new 800,000 tonne per annum plant in Orissa will become operational 3 to 6 months ahead of the scheduled date of March 2012.

Mr Arvind Parakh director finance at JSL Stainless said that "We will be doubling our capacity in a year. Orissa will help us achieve a lot of cost competitiveness."

Mr Parakh said that the company has current steel capacity of 720,000 tonnes at Hissar in Haryana.

The company halved its original plan of building 1.6 million tonnes plant in Orissa following the economic downturn, and now plans to add the balance capacity only after it is out of the debt recast plan or corporate debt restructuring mechanism.

The company, which has a total debt of about INR 80 billion, got its lenders to recast its debt earlier this year stretching repayment period to a maximum of 10 years.

Mr Parakh said that "Definitely we will not be in CDR for 10 years. Definitely we will come out much earlier. The company is also targeting to bring down its overall borrowing cost to 7% to 8% in the next fiscal year from 8.5% now. For that what we are doing is converting part of our loan into foreign currency."

Mr Parakh said that JSL Stainless is also planning to acquire coal, chrome and nickel mines overseas, mainly in Europe and the Middle East, to tide over the volatility in raw material prices. He added that "We are looking at mines overseas because in India it will be very difficult to get mines based on various environmental and state government issues and the company was talking, but nothing has been firmed up as yet."

Mr Parakh said that the September quarter EBIDTA margins will be marginally lower as compared to 19% in April to June 2010 period. He added that "The current quarter margins will be marginally impacted because of volatility in raw material prices, but in the third and fourth quarter we expect improvement because they are traditionally the best quarters for the industry."

Mr Parakh said that JSL Stainless expects 17% to 19% operating margin and a rise of 10% to 15% in volume and 15% to 20% in sales for the current fiscal year and prices of finished products are likely to remain stable in the next 3 months.

(Sourced from www.reuters.com)