In-Line Q3 For JSW Steel | Will Keep A Tab On Net Debt To EBITDA Ratio, Says Company | CNBC TV18

Yeah, I think if you look at the global economic outlook by IMF, it outlines the fact that the global economy has been very resilient in spite of various uncertainties globally which we are facing. The steel demand in the rest of the world is doing reasonably okay. The steel demand in China, as we are aware, has been under strain. India, from a steel demand perspective, is the fastest growing as well as the economy is the fastest growing. So India is doing quite well. We see the current quarter, coming quarter, quarter four to be seasonally strong from a demand standpoint and we are well placed to take advantage of the demand in India.

Yes. So if you look at it, I think we are thankful to the government of India for having taken effective trade measures in the last two months, both from anti-dumping point of view and safeguard on flat products. I think that's been very encouraging. The idea is to ensure that fair trade happens in India and the domestic industry is at a level playing field. From a price standpoint, if you look back, the prices which were there in the last quarter have been at a multi-year low. The prices have now started recovering. We see price increases in the month of January and we think there is a possibility for some price recovery in this quarter during February and March as well. We'll watch how it goes but from a raw metal standpoint, the costs are also going up. I think part of the price movement is also on account of cost. You see coal prices which have gone up from the lows of about 180s to now more than 240 and touching 250 yesterday for B Australia that will have an impact on cost and we need to look at the iron ore side. While it has been rangebound and we do expect it to be rangebound, that's another cost area which we need to watch and see whether it impacts us in this quarter or not. Otherwise from a margin perspective, I think these prices should enable us to improve our margins after offsetting some of the costs.

Yes. So from a price point of view, the prices started, if I take hot as an example of flat products, the prices started moving from the second half of December and I think we saw an increase of about 1,500 rupees in December and about 2,000 rupees in the beginning of January. If you look at the coking coal cost in the last quarter, the coking coal cost went up by about $5 and we had guided between $3 to $5 and that's where we have been. Iron ore has been rangebound, actually we could save a little bit on the iron ore cost by improvement in our efficiencies and blend. So with that, we were able to offset some of the cost but still the lower prices had an impact on the margin. I think our main achievement for the past quarter is the volume story. We had a very good production maintaining 93% capacity utilization excluding our BF3 which is under shutdown at Vijayagar for capacity augmentation. We have been able to do record sales in the quarter 1 both from consolidated and Indian operations point of view. And basically we have been able to mitigate the impact of the drop in prices through a better product mix. Our value added sales reached the highest ever at 4.54 million tons.

In the quarter four, as I was mentioning, the coking coal prices are moving because of some seasonal disturbances in Australia. We expect in the range of $15 to $20 impact in this quarter.