Managing Director
(India and South East Asia)
Despite extremely challenging economic conditions, we achieved our highest ever sales at 9.5 MnT. This resulted in us successfully consolidating our market share in India. We witnessed a strong growth in our key segments viz. automotive and branded products. Our investments towards growing our markets and building our equity continue. We have made a good beginning on the digital journey and notable progress in productivity and work process improvements. Productivity, Safety and Profitability have been built into the union agreements in place of metrics like production and profits.
Our Kalinganagar plant has picked up pace and is expected to aid in further consolidating our presence in existing high-end market segments. We are wellpositioned to leverage the demand arising out of India's economic growth.
Our South East Asia operations had encouraging performance. Our interventions on cost rationalisation and portfolio optimisation have started delivering results.
We continue our commitment to industry-leading CSR practices. A safety and environment conscious culture has been successfully imbibed across the organisation. This is reflected in many of our metrics. We continue to balance business goals and sustainability in all aspects. Going forward, we will continue to focus on cost improvement initiatives and downstream value-addition across our products and market segments.
Group Executive Director (F&C) and
Executive Director – Europe
We continue to make efforts to deliver sustainable value to stakeholders, even during testing times. During the year, we have managed our liquidity and financial exposure carefully with adequate balance to create long-term assets including capital expenditure of ₹11,486 crore, largely towards completion of our greenfield project in Kalinganagar and capability enhancement projects in IJmuiden. Despite this, our net debt increase is not sharp and our liquidity position remains strong. During the year, we took steps to continue our operational excellence initiatives, undertook portfolio actions and monetised investments to sustain our business performance amidst very volatile market conditions. Most of our subsidiaries and joint ventures in India and South East Asia also improved their performance and helped the overall performance of the Company.
In the near-term, our focus would be on ramping up our operations in our Kalinganagar Plant, restructuring of the European portfolio and strengthening our financial position.
From this year we are formally migrating from compliance based reporting to governance based reporting. Our Integrated Report will give you, the owners of financial capital, visibility into our sustainability and people practices. We believe that fundamental to comprehensive value creation is integrated planning and execution of business strategy across all the capital sources available to the organisation. We will endeavour to expand the coverage of the Integrated Report and disclosures in phases in the coming years to cover the wider Tata Steel Group.