Jindal Stainless is one of the largest stainless steel conglomerates in India with around 60% industry share and ranks amongst the top 10 stainless steel manufacturer capacities of 1.6 MTPA with an annual turnover of $ 3.1 billion. The country is poised to experience a 5% GDP growth with the increasing use of stainless steel. Vijay Sharma, Sales Head, Jindal Stainless Group, told BE, “It is called stainless because it has minimum alloying with chromium (around 10.5%) which makes it stainless. So for this reason stainless steel is a better option. The integrated scale of operations, from mining to manufacturing of finished products, have given us the edge of cost competitiveness and operational efficiency, making us one of the best stainless steel producers in the world.”
Stainless steel is inherently corrosion resistant, durable, recyclable and the industry is growing at a rate of 5% globally when compared to carbon steel, copper etc. Stainless steel is the preferred choice in industries like nuclear energy, construction and architecture, automotive and transport, oil and gas, desalination processes, fertiliser, kitchen utensils, storage, etc. Jindal Stainless mainly creates flat products and long products where the long products are new in the line. The company experienced a 15% growth in revenue generation in FY 2017-18 from the last `20,000 crore line. The flat products from the company mainly consist of railway products (11%), automobiles (8-9%), healthcare, commercial and kitchenware (15%).
The Indian Railways is the backbone of movement and transportation in our country. The revenues from freight traffic accounting for 64% of the total revenue of railways improved by 4.1% to reach Rs. 10,273 Crore in March 2017. Sharma also mentioned, “The country would witness a substantial growth in the case of Indian Railway coaches. Currently, the country has 2500 coaches made of stainless steel every year and this would increase to 5000 coaches by 2020.” Jindal Stainless Group is supplying 35,000 MT of stainless steel annually to wagon manufacturers and this is likely to touch 70,000 MT by end of FY 2020. Railways used to procure raw materials directly from steel manufacturers and pass it on to the wagon manufacturers. This was a tedious process and often resulted in cost and time overruns for the private players.
Jindal Stainless and Research Design and Standards Organisation (RDSO) are working on two more wagon models namely BOBRN and BOST. These will have better anti-wear properties and would be lighter in weight. The growth in stainless steel demand from wagon business is expected to be around 10-15% annually and Jindal Stainless is geared to meet such demand expectations.
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