The Proof Is In The Roof

Riten Choudhury, MD, Tata BlueScope Steel, on how the company has become a household name across its products

- Jayashree Mendes

If you had to reminisce on the highlights of the last few years, what would they be? I have been with the Tata Group since 1990 and was assigned to Tata BluesSope Steel in 2010 as VP of building products. We grew that business substantially till 2013. In the same year, I took over as MD. Year 2013 was a challenging phase as our manufacturing operations in Jamshedpur had just started and our mandate was to ramp up production. Since it was a new plant, we had to contend with issues such as manufacturing processes, quality, productivity, etc. My first challenge was to stabilise the plant since we had already invested more than Rs 1000 crore, and was our largest investment. We sourced the plant and equipment from Siemens-VAI and is one of the most modern plants in the BlueScope family.

Increasing production was alright, but we needed to create a market for the premium products we were manufacturing, and that was not a large one. Our issue was that Tata BlueScope products are considered niche. A strategic move we made was to focus on retail as that would give us quick volumes in terms of growth and so we quickly built up a retail network to the current level of 4000-plus retailers. Though we had a retail business since 2008-2009, initially we ran the business with imports from BlueScope plants since we didn’t have a local facility. We developed Tata Steel’s existing network of distributors for galvanized sheets to sell colour coded products. In addition, we added a second layer of influencers (fabricators) and have close to 6000-7000 fabricators who help us with the smaller customers. This business has now grown to 12,000 tonnes per month in retail alone.

Second area of concern was that building solutions business which focused on design and commissioning of large buildings was going through a rough phase. We restructured the organisation and made it result oriented thus giving authority to sales heads, while creating a new business model.