The company, a subsidiary of Tata Steel,   closed its 1,00,000 tonne pig iron unti at Redi, Maharashtra. If one may recollect, last year, the company had scrapped a Rs.180 crore agreement to sell the unit to Fomento Resources group on valuation issues. And this closure of the unit weighed down the company. It had to pay Rs.11 crore for employee settlement and another Rs.45 crore for impairment of plant, machinery and other assets.  This dragged down the profitability of the company, posting a consolidated net loss of Rs.61 crore. For FY13, the net loss stood at Rs.54 crore v/s Rs.91 crore loss in FY12.

Hopefully, this will be a one-time hit which the company would take and with its books now cleaned up, it will look at FY14 with more optimism. The company will began the commercial operation at its sinter plant at its Kharagpur facility on April 5 after receiving the “consent to operate” from the West Bengal Pollution Control Board. The sinter plant is expected to improve productivity by 15%. The company has also signed, along with Tata Steel is working on a 3 million tonne and Rs.15,000 crore project in Haveri district of Karnataka. Its acquisition of  2500 acres of land has also progressed well. The company, along with Tata Tata Metaliks Kubota Pipes Ltd (TMKPL) will be merged with Tata Steel, through a scheme of amalgamation, which will be sanctioned through a court approval process. As per the scheme, for every 29 equity shares of Rs.10 each held by the public shareholders of TML, four equity shares of Rs.10 each of Tata Steel shall be issued after the scheme is approved by the courts.