'WE AIM TO BE AMONG THE TOP 5 STAINLESS STEEL MAKERS IN THE WORLD'

Jindal Stainless MD Abhyuday Jindal reveals how his company stayed on top of things despite difficult market conditions

- NIDHI SINGAL

STAINLESS STEEL-often called the metal for nation building is being increasingly used for architecture, building and construction activities, automobiles, transportation, railways, and even space, all over the world. However, the export duty of 15 per cent on steel and stainless steel, which was recently rolled back by the government, dampened business operability, says Abhyuday Jindal, MD of Jindal Stainless Ltd (JSL). In an exclusive interaction with BT, the 33-year-old talks about JSL's strategy that helped it climb 59 ranks in the BT500 2022 list to 370, the benefits of its upcoming merger with Jindal Stainless (Hisar) Ltd or JSHL, expansion plans and more. Edited excerpts:

Despite rising input costs and export duties, what was the strategy that worked for you?

The April-June quarter was quite challenging because there were two or three external factors that came into effect. First, the commodity cycle was on a downward trend. All raw material prices were falling. When that starts happening, the whole economy, and the world, go into a kind of 'destocking' mode. There is pressure to sell volumes, [and] there is pressure on margins.

[At the] same time, our government came up with this 15 per cent export duty. That was a double whammy for companies like us. Prices were coming down anyway, and with the [imposition of] export duty, it became unviable for Indian companies to export.

There are certain sizes [of stainless steel products] that we had created only for the export segment... these had to be pushed to the domestic market [after the imposition of export duty]. One positive is that our company is very agile.