Essar to supply plates for warships

Essar Steel on Thursday said it has become the first Indian producer of steel plates approved by the government for supply to the Indian Navy for building strategic war ships.

"Essar Steel's plate mill became the first primer plate producer in the country to be recognized for indigenous development of steel for building ships for the Indian Navy ... Company has received a prestigious order from Mazagoan Dock (MDL) to supply 13,000 tonnes of heavy plates," the company said in a statement.

The heavy plates will be used for manufacturing state-of-the art ships for defence and this is for the first time that MDL has placed an order for such a large consignment of steel plates from a domestic steel mill.

The order, the company said, follows a "stringent mill audit of Essar Steel's recently commissioned wide-plate mill conducted by teams from the Directorate of Naval Architecture (DNA), Defence Metallurgical Research Laboratory (DMRL) and the Director General of Quality Assurance (DGQA) of the Ministry of Defence."

Set up at a cost of about Rs 2,000 crore (Rs 20 billion), the plate mill has an annual production capacity of 1.5 million tonnes.

"Equipped with state-of-the-art equipment and controls - along with cutting edge technology sourced from Siemens Voest Alpine - the mill is the only one of its kind in the country capable of producing 5-metre wide plates conforming to global standards," it said.

The plates find applications in diverse segments, including defence, oil and gas, boilers and pressure vessels, heavy duty earth-moving machines, wind towers, mine protective vehicles and construction.

Claiming that its products are ultra-strong and all-weather resistant, the company said until now, these products were largely imported.

It said Essar has also become the country's only steel plant with integrated facilities and items ranging from heavy plates to hot rolling and cold rolling products, with a full distribution business under the brand Essar Hypermarts.

The plate mill has unique finishing facilities that include normalised rolled, furnace-normalised, direct quenched, quenched and tempered (QT) plates and accelerated direct cooling (ADCO).

Essar Steel, a part of the Ruias-led Essar Group has a production capacity of 14 million tonnes per annum (MTPA).