To begin with, sir, a good set of numbers that came in. Revenues of nearly 4.8% and you had a net profit which has doubled on a year-to-year basis. Can you take us through the realization picture during the quarter in Q4?
Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Sajjid, for having me on the show. Yeah, Q4 was more about cost takeouts. You know, revenues were quite flat. Revenues improved significantly in Q4 compared to Q3, but I think we've been doing a lot of work on cost takeouts both in India and in Europe and some of that played out and that's a benefit that you see in the numbers for Q4. But overall the market situation is getting a bit better. In India, the safeguard duties have helped and in Europe as well the spreads have improved a bit because the raw material prices have come off and steel prices are reasonably stable. So we're looking at this trajectory continuing going forward.
Mhm. Sir, during the year you brought in the Kalinganagar new furnace into play and if you look at the India volumes it was around 21 million tons which is higher by 5%. Do you see a further jump in volumes in terms of deliveries coming in FY26?
Yeah, in FY26 we are guiding that the net volume will be about 1.5 million tons higher. Kalinga itself will be about 2 million tons higher but we have a blast furnace relining coming up in Jamshedpur which will take out some of the volumes at an overall level. So that's why our guidance is one and a half million tons more basically in India in FY26 over FY25.
And how do you look at the European market, especially the Netherlands market where you have seen some kind of, you know, cost efficiency gains coming in? And also give us a sense of how UK is looking.
Yeah. So in Europe you won't see too much of volume growth because we're pretty much peaked on the volumes. Maybe a little bit more in Netherlands than you saw this year because a big jump came in this year compared to last year where the volumes are significantly higher. Overall we see the Netherlands numbers continuing to get better because of the transformation actions that we are taking and there is an improvement in spreads in Europe thanks to some of the quotas imposed by the EU in response to the tariff measures. We've taken as far as UK is concerned, we continue to take out costs. We've taken out about 230 million pounds of fixed costs during the last year. We'll take out another 200 million pounds of fixed cost this year. So the markets are not great in UK because UK doesn't have the quotas that Europe has. We're seeing the pressure from the market but on a cost side we're taking out a lot. So we're expecting the EBITDA numbers in Netherlands to improve this year compared to last year and in UK as well we hope to get into positive EBITDA territory during the year. It may not be profitable but in terms of EBITDA you will be positive in FY26.
Absolutely. What's happening to the entire revamp which is coming up in the UK? Have you started the work? What kind of investments are going to come in from you?
Yeah. So as we announced last year, it's a 1.25 billion pound project out of which we're getting a 500 million grant from the UK government. The balance 750 million pounds will be put in by us. Over the last 6 months we were working on the planning permissions which we've got. I think by end of June we will have all the permissions that we seek. We hope to start construction, do the groundbreaking and start construction in July. We've already placed a lot of orders for the equipment supply and we are on track to get it up and running by FY27.
Mhm. You know, sir, how do you look at the entire market as a whole, domestic market and globally? We're seeing a lot of disruption which is coming in with respect to tariffs between US and China. Now it's gone for a pause for 90 days. How do you see the entire market dynamics changing? Is it, you know, from a pricing point of view and from a volume point of view?
So steel is a global industry. Not only does about 400 million tons of steel go across borders, about 2 billion tons of raw materials for making steel goes across borders. So we are very geopolitically plugged in. Also all our customers are global industries, you know, automobile, packaging, appliances, construction, etc. So whatever happens in the world has a big impact on us. So the tariff situation was not very helpful because most of our customers are part of global value chains and uncertainty doesn't help. But now that we are seeing some sort of stabilization on that, settling down of tariffs, signing of bilateral trade deals, I think we expect that the fragility that the market was encountering over the last few months will not be there going forward. So we are positive about it because tariffs also would have had inflationary pressures which would have put pressure on interest rates which doesn't help us again because we are a capital intensive industry. So overall I see the situation improving in the last maybe 2-3 weeks than we felt in the first week of April.
Mhm. You know, there are two trade deals that are in focus. One is an India-UK trade deal and the other one is a UK-US trade deal. How does this benefit you in any way?
Well, for us, India-UK does not have much of an impact on steel. The UK-US, we sell about 80 to 100,000 tons of steel from the UK to the US. So that had a little bit of doubt about it but that's gone off with this. It's not yet a formal trade deal. I think it's some sort of an agreement between the UK and the US and that's beneficial to us. Again, more importantly, bringing down the import duties on automobile exports from UK to US is helpful for us indirectly because we sell to the auto industry in the UK as well. So overall, like I said, lower tariffs or stability in tariffs is good for our business.
Mhm. Sir, in FY25 you did a capex of nearly 16,000 crores. Is there a guidance that you have for FY26 and FY27?
It will be in that range. It'll be about 15,000 crore plus. It'll be 15,200-15,300 crores.
And where are you going to put in that capex in?
80% of that will be in India because we will be completing the Kalinga expansion. We have an electric arc furnace coming up in Ludhiana which should also get ready during the year and then the other sustenance capex in India, also the investments that we're making in mining because mining, particularly iron ore mining, continues to grow to feed our growing steel business.
