Tata Steel brings global assets under Singapore arm

Tata Steel, India's largest steelmaker, has consolidated all its overseas assets including Corus under a new holding company, Tata Steel Global, to raise funds for its overseas expansion including future acquisitions.

Tata Steel Global, based in Singapore with over $13 billion enterprise value, will raise funds for international acquisitions of smaller steel makers and mines, Koushik Chatterjee, group chief financial officer told media.

Apart from Corus, Tata Steel owns Tata Steel Thailand and NatSteel Asia. It is setting up a ferro chrome plant in South Africa. The firm has acquired stake in two coal mines in Mozambique and one in Australia. It also has stakes in an iron ore mine in Ivory Coast and has entered into a joint venture in Oman for limestone mining. Moreover, it is scouting for coal and iron mines globally and small steel plants in Asia.

Tata Steel has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Vietnam government to set up a 4.5-million-tonne steel plant. According to calculations, the greenfield project in Vietnam will require $3.5 billion investment.

The company plans to raise Rs 1,000 crore (Rs 10 billion) debt as part of an already announced Rs 12,000-crore (Rs 120 billion) expansion of its Indian operations. Half of the planned investment, which will increase domestic capacity to 3 million tonnes by 2010-11, had already been drawn from accruals, Chatterjee said.

Chatterjee indicated that the company was in no hurry to raise steel prices as the self-imposed moratorium by the domestic steel makers for holding prices ends next week.