Bhutan, a China-bordering country east of Nepal and north of Bangladesh, announced the construction of a steel plant in the Motanga Industrial Park in Samdrupjongkhar. The plant will be built at a cost of Nu 1.3 billion (USD $17.8 million) and will occupy 6.7 acres.
The plant will be set up under Druk Metallurgy Limited (DMI), a new foreign direct investment JV between Druk Holding and Investments (DHI) and its Indian partner Dilip Kumar Goenka (DKG), the principal partner of KD Iron and Steel in Assam. DHI’s Associate Director of Department of Investment, Sherab Namgay, said most of the production would be exported to India. Namgay added that the steel site is larger that even those in northeastern India.
According to the announcement, the plant will have the state-of-art steel melting facility based on Induction Furnace (IF) Technology, Continuous Casting Machine (CCM), hot charging to the rolling mill stands together with the necessary automations and automatic materials handling systems, including advanced environmental pollution control equipment. The energy intensive integrated steel plant will produce MS billets and TMT bars consuming 30 megawatts of power a year.
The plant will produce 200,000 metric mt of billets annually in the first phase expected to be completed by the summer of 2019 and 200,000 mt of TMT bars annually in the second phase with construction completion estimated for July 2020. Billets will be used as raw material to produce the TMT bars. The company is expected to employ about 165 people in the first phase and grow to 219 people in the second phase.
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