Tata Steel CEO TV Narendran Explains How Company Navigated a Tough Quarter

Sure. Firstly, thanks Nisha for having me on the show. Yeah, it's been a tough quarter. In fact, in many ways, the realizations in India, at least in October, November, were the lowest in the last 5 years. So, we really struggled from a realization point of view. But I think the actions on safeguard etc has helped and plus the sentiment has got better and better and the domestic demand is also growing. So hence you've seen prices going up. But the highlights of last few quarters and particularly last quarter has been a strong operational performance. A lot of cost takeouts that we had planned during the year has happened across geographies. So we had guided that we'll take out about 11,500 crores of cost during the year across geographies and we are on track for that. So the internal actions, additional volume, cost takeouts etc helped us in delivering the numbers better than the markets would suggest or the realizations would suggest. But I think we've hit the bottom as far as realizations is concerned and things are picking up now.

Yeah, so yes, cooking coal prices have gone up by about $50 in the last 6 weeks or so. Cooking coal is a bit illiquid as a market. So it's very vulnerable to specific events. It could be bad weather conditions in Australia or something else happening in some mine or the other. So that's why you see this kind of volatility. So yes, you're right that will have an impact on the price outlook because cooking coal costs are typically 30 to 40% of the cost for any steel maker. So if cooking coal prices go up significantly, steel companies will try to pass on those costs to the customers. So while the actions in the last few weeks in India has brought domestic prices at import landed parity or slightly better, the pressures on cooking coal costs will probably push prices up a bit more. So we'll wait and see how that plays out. So the guidance we've given on prices for Q4 compared to Q3 is about 2,200 rupees per ton higher in Q4 compared to Q3 for India.