Expect Indian Steel Prices To Sustain At Current Levels: Tata Steel MD & CEO TV Narendran

Yes. Prices have moved up a bit in India. I think it's about 3,000 rupees higher this quarter than last quarter. That's the way we see the prices in India. In Europe, it's about 20 to 30 higher in this quarter compared to the last quarter. So that's the situation that we see in both geographies.

I think the pricing will certainly sustain at this level. Whether it goes higher depends on what happens in the international markets. I think the concern continues that China exports about 10 million tons a month. They exported that much in March and in April and that certainly has a dampening effect on international prices. But I think when you look at importing into India, there is a risk of forex, there is a risk of material arriving 3 months later, you don't know where the prices will be at that point in time. So that's why imports are not yet significant. I think the safeguard duty has helped stem the flow a bit and so we're looking forward to some stability in prices and some positive movement in prices going forward.

I think we're guiding that this quarter will be about $10 lower in terms of consumption coking coal because we got a lot of the benefit in the last quarter. So the drop in coking coal prices has stopped. It's stabilized. In fact, it's gone up by about $105 in the last few weeks. But from a consumption point of view, we expect a consumption cost to be about $10 lower this quarter compared to last quarter.

So if you look at Europe, as you're aware, we are in the middle of transformation both in UK and in the Netherlands. I think the challenge in Europe has been that we need to continuously transform to stay ahead of the curve. So in UK a lot of the transformation is already underway. As you're aware, we closed the blast furnaces last year. We will have the electric arc furnace coming up in 2027 but in between we'll be taking out a lot of costs. We've already taken about 230 million pounds of fixed costs in UK in the last year and we'll be taking out another 200 million pounds of fixed costs in the UK this year. So a lot of the cost saving is coming from that. In Netherlands as well, we are in the middle of a major transformation. If you look at the Netherlands numbers, we have actually swung from minus 450 to 500 million negative EBITDA to 80 to 90 million positive EBITDA. So that's a 500 million swing in a difficult market and we expect to move in that direction this year as well. So to go back to your question, I think we expect Netherlands to continue to be obviously a bit positive and get better as we go along because of the actions that we are taking and if the prices move up that's going to help us even more. As far as UK is concerned, we are pretty close to break even as far as EBITDA is concerned. Some of these cost takeouts of last year will play out this year. So you'll see that playing out during this year. So we expect that this year certainly Europe between Netherlands and UK will clearly be EBITDA positive, but there's still work to do there. As far as India is concerned, yes, the EBITDA I can't give you a specific guidance on the EBITDA but certainly we expect this year to be better than last year.

Yeah. So I think Europe will move into the green from this quarter itself. Okay. But UK will still be marginally negative this quarter and we hope in the next couple of quarters we will turn green there as well and we are expecting that UK will be green for the full year.