Tata Steel Ltd 144A

Ladies and gentlemen, good day and welcome to the Tata Steel analyst call. Please note that this meeting is being recorded. All the attendees' audio and video has been disabled from the backend and will be enabled subsequently. I would now like to hand the conference over to Ms. Samitasha. Thank you and over to you, ma'am.

Thank you, Kanchuk. Good afternoon, everybody, and good morning and good evening to those of you joining us from different time zones. Welcome to this call to discuss our results for the fourth quarter in the financial year FY24. We are joined by Mr. Narendran, our CEO and Managing Director, and Mr. Chatterjee, our Executive Director and CFO. I hope you'll have had a chance to go through our results, which were published yesterday, and the presentation, which is up on our website. The entire discussion today will be covered by the Safe Harbor Clause, which is on page two of the presentation. I will now request Narendra to make a few opening comments before we then move on to Q&A. Thank you, and over to you, Narendra.

Thanks, Amita, and hello, everyone. I'm going to make a few comments and then pass it on to Kaushik for his comments, and then we'll open it up for questions. FI24 has been a year of progress for Tata Steel despite the operating environment. The global commodity prices, including steel, have been significantly impacted by what's been happening in China. And China's economy is yet to fully recover from its pre-pandemic, to its pre-pandemic activity levels. And its property sector has been in a prolonged slump. While these factors weighed on the steel demand, production remained broadly stable, leading to elevated exports. And as a result, global steel prices have moderated across regions, including India, particularly for flat products. And geopolitical tensions have weighed in on the sentiment as well. Despite the overhang of the domestic steel prices, our India performance improved on a year-on-year basis, aided by growth in volumes and an agile business model that is focused on optimizing the cost profile. We achieved the highest ever crude steel production of 20.8 million tons, as well as deliveries of around 19.9 million tons, and the domestic deliveries were up 9% year-on-year, leveraging the persistent demand in the domestic market. Among the market segments, automotive volumes were aided by higher deliveries of hot-rolled and cold-rolled coils to the automotive OEMs and grew by 8% year-on-year, and the focus on the product mix led to a 6% year-on-year growth in high-end sales. A well-established retail brand, Aratiscon, witnessed a 15% year-on-year growth and crossed 2 million tons on an annual basis. We cover more than 8,000 PIN codes through a dedicated channel of distributors, dealers, influencers, and have an e-commerce platform called Asiana, also to reach out to customers who may even be outside India, who want to place orders for steel to be delivered in India. We are looking to shape construction market practices through ready-to-use solutions and have 33 construction centers pan-India that have been started over the last few years and this enables off-site construction and helps us move the value chain because that's a trend which is there and more gently reduced our dependence on external purchases. Overall in India, we continue to focus on market leadership across chosen segments via capacity expansion as well as product mix enrichment. And at Kalinga Nagar, we initiated the store heating. Stove is also started for the blast furnace. We started heating the first stove a couple of months back. We also started the chimney heating for the coke ovens. And so the commissioning activities are continuing in a phased manner. During the year, the 2.2 million ton per annum coal rolling mill was started, which helped us in our downstream presence. As far as UK is concerned, we are committed to a sustainable future and we've decided to proceed with our proposed restructuring and transition to greener steelmaking. We look carefully at all the options over the last seven months in consultation with the union representatives. We will be closing one blast furnace by the end of June. The co-covens is already closed in March, as you may be aware. We were supposed to close it in June, but because of operational reasons, we closed it earlier. And by September, we will close the second and the last blast furnace. Our proposal is the most viable and preserves majority of the jobs in the UK. And Tata Steel remains committed to creating a low CO2 steel business, which will reduce about 50 million tons of CO2 emissions over a decade in the UK. The proposed plan will safeguard steel supplies in UK and Wales and create economic opportunities for generations to come. In Netherlands, our production was lower in FY24 due to the reline of the blast furnace 6, which took longer than we had planned for. And this weighed on the cost profile. The realigning was completed early February and we have a situation where the blast furnace is fully ramped up now. We are committed to responsible growth and sustainability is at the core of our strategy. Our route and pace of decarbonization is calibrated across geographies. I have already spoken in detail about the UK. In Netherlands, we are in discussions with the government for financial and policy support to aid a green steel plant and clean steel plant. In India, we are undertaking multiple initiatives including pilots to avoid or convert captured carbon We have undertaken measures to green our energy mix to reduce our dependence on coal-based power plants and are also focused on nature-based solutions and conserving water. For instance, we have championed bamboo plantation in our leasehold land and communities barren land around Jharia where our underground coal mines are. The collaboration with farmers will generate livelihood opportunities and act as a carbon sink over time. The bamboo can be converted into biochar and replace the pulverized coal which we inject today into our blasphemous. To a certain extent, this reduces emissions as well. I am happy to share that our water conservation efforts have led to zero effluent discharge at the Kalinganagar site. With this, we now have two sites that have achieved zero effluent discharge, namely Kalinganagar and the Kamaria site, which we acquired from Usha Martin some time back. We also recently became the first Indian steel company to ship raw materials from Australia using biofuel blend with a very low sulfur fuel oil, which is a VLSFO, setting a new benchmark for sustainable shipping practices in India. On that note, thank you once again, and I'll hand over to Kaushik.