JSW Steel secures 4 lakh tonne more of ore at e-auction

The fifth round of iron ore e-auction held in Karnataka on Tuesday saw JSW Steel securing 4 lakh tonne of low quality iron ore for its beleaguered 10 million tonne steel plant at Vijayanagar, giving it running oxygen for a few more days.

However, Vinod Nowal, chief operating officer of the company, said the steel industry in Karnataka would put up a request to the monitoring committee to hold yet another round of e-auction as early as November 2 or 3 or else it would be difficult to sustain operations.

“We are currently operating at 60% capacity utilisation and are trying to engage the authorities to iron out the procedural delays at the earliest so that delivery of the auctioned ore happens at the earliest,” he said.

Nowal said in the fifth round of e-auction, the company was able to secure 4 lakh tonnes of iron ore out of which around 10% was lumps and rest all was fines.

“Most of it was low quality ore and hence the prices did not go up too high but NMDC could not find buyers for its Donimalai ore due to a high base price,” he said.

NMDC’s entire 2 lakh tonne of lump iron ore remain unsold as the company had put a price which was even higher than the China’s spot market by approximately Rs1,000 per tonne.