Durgapur Steel plans to resume export of rail wheel sets

October 3, 2009: Steel Authority of India Ltd's Durgapur Steel Plant (DSP) is planning to resume export of railway wheel sets.

This was indicated by V. Shyamsundar, DSP's Managing Director. "We produce internationally certified top class railway wheel sets which are in demand in foreign countries and we did export in the past," Shyamsundar said.

He was responding to a query on the future of DSP's wheel and axle division in the context of more such plants coming up in the country.

But, then, as he explained, the export decision would depend to a large extent on the Indian Railways which placed order for 67,000 wheel sets last year against DSP's capacity of 80,000/85,000 sets annually. "If the Railways orders are not enough to run the division close to capacity, the export opportunity will be explored," he said.

Asked if he had received inquiries from abroad, he replied, "We know who the buyers are and who want our wheel sets."

According to Shyamsundar, in the current fiscal DSP hoped to achieve a production of 2.08 million tons (mt) compared with 1.79 mt in 2008-09. Till September however, the production was 0.89 mt, representing 7.6 percent growth over the production in the same period of last year.

"In the first half, the production is low as always, as we undertake major repair work; also the monsoon is a problem," he said. In the second half, DSP, he sounded confident, would produce enough to be able to achieve the targeted production.

The first phase of the DSP expansion programme, as he indicated, should be over in 2011-12. The main components of the expansion programme, estimated to cost Rs 3,000 crore, would be achieving 100 percent production through the continuous casting route, setting up a one million tons per annum medium structural facility, bloom-cum-round caster and debottlenecking of coke oven plant, raw material handling facility and steel melting shop.

The production capacity, following the expansion, will rise to 2.12 mt. "Our capacity will not increase significantly but we'll be more efficient," he said. "Also, the share of finished production will rise to 64 percent from less than 50 percent now." The orders for the new plants to be set up would be finalised within the next two months, he said.

In the second phase, the plan was to revamp the blast furnace. "However, we're yet to decide whether to rebuild the existing blast furnace or go for a greenfield one," he added.

Source: Business Line