Tata Steel Capex Guidance for This FY Is ₹15,000 Crore

A day after Tata Steel doubled its consolidated net profit in Q4FY25, TV Narendran, managing director and chief executive officer, and Koushik Chatterjee, executive director and chief financial officer, discuss a range of issues with Ishita Ayan Dutt during a video interview. Edited excerpts:

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Tata Steel's net profit in Q4FY25 jumped 112.7 per cent year-on-year (Y-o-Y). What led to this performance?

Narendran: In Europe, the Netherlands moved from negative earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (Ebitda) to a positive Ebitda over the last few quarters. The UK has not improved much in terms of Ebitda, but will start improving. We will see the impact of all the cost takeouts playing out. And, we have seen margins and spreads stabilising and improving a bit because in the last quarter coking coal prices went down. In India, because of the safeguard duty, steel prices stabilised and started moving up. Overall, the volumes have grown. In the Netherlands, volumes have gone up significantly compared to the previous year. In India, volumes have risen because of Kalinganagar.

In the UK, your Ebitda loss has widened both Y-o-Y and quarter-on-quarter (Q-o-Q) even after the closure of heavy-end operations. When do you see break-even?

Narendran: We have taken out more than 200 million pounds of fixed costs in the last year. We will take out another 200 million pounds this year. For most of last year, we had the blast furnaces running. The impact of fixed cost takeouts will be felt now. The markets have been quite tough in the UK. So, some of the benefits that we had in the cost takeout were negated. Unlike Europe, which has put in quotas to protect itself against imports post the tariff action in the US, the UK has not yet put in any quotas. We are working with the government on that. But we expect the situation to change and the UK to be Ebitda neutral or Ebitda positive during the year.