On May 7, Essar Steel Holdings, a subsidiary of India's Essar Group, inaugurated its fourth steel service centre facility at Bahadurgarh near New Delhi in India, raising the company's service centers' combined annual capacity to 2.5 million mt.
The Bahadurgarh facility, set up at a cost of Rupees 750 million ($15.23 million), has an annual steel process capacity of 250,000 mt., while it includes a CR slitting line, CR narrow cut to length line, CR wide cut to length line and HR cut to length line. It will enable Essar Steel to cater to even single sheet customers, with small lots and customized deliveries for ready-to-use steel.
Meanwhile, Essar Steel said that it would invest Rupees 10 billion (around $200 million) in three years for setting up new steel service centers in India, North America and Middle East as demand and price rises in the domestic market but will put on hold plans to build new plants in Vietnam and Trinidad and Tobago, and Minnesota, the US.
The company previously planned a 2 million mt hot-strip mill in Vietnam, a 2.5 million mt integrated steel plant in Trinidad & Tobago and a 4.1 million mt steel plant in Minnesota, US. All these projects would have required investments of over Rupees 300 billion ($6 billion).
The company is also in the process of expanding its Hazira steel plant's annual capacity to 10 million mt with investments of close to Rupees 140 billion ($2.84 billion). The expanded capacity is likely to go on stream by June, 2010.
Essar Steel is a fully integrated flat carbon steel manufacturer, with a current annual capacity of 4.6 million mt.