Tata Steel’s group chief executive officer, T V Narendran, highlighted that the company’s UK operations required “substantive and permanent” financial support from the British government.
Narendran noted during a media interview on Nov 19 that Tata Steel Europe had been cashflow positive/neutral for the past six months with the UK operations, which have not received any support from the Indian headquarters, “within sight” of being self-sustainable.
That said, the group’s former head of strategy Nirmalya Kumar contradicted Narendran in another media interview saying the idea of the UK operations being self-sustaining was a hope and not a strategy, given that it continues to lose hundreds of millions of pounds per year.
Tata Steel Europe’s executive director and chief financial officer Koushik Chatterjee had said on Nov 13 that, the company will “hive off” Tata Steel Netherlands from Tata Steel UK and “pursue separate strategic paths for both”.
Tata Steel UK operates two blast furnaces at its integrated Port Talbot steelworks, which has the capacity to produce 5mn mt of crude steel and the capability to manufacture slabs, hot rolled, cold rolled, and galvanized coil.