SAIL, MOIL ink agreement for joint production

NEW DELHI: Steel Authority of India Ltd (SAIL) and Manganese Ore India Ltd (MOIL) on Tuesday inked an MoU to jointly produce ferro-manganese and silico-manganese from three new furnaces to be set up at an investment of Rs 225 crore near Bhilai.

The Boards of both the companies had earlier given the go-ahead for setting up the 50:50 JV company with a debt-equity ratio of 1:1, according to a SAIL release here.

The proposed JV company would initially supply around 31,000 million tons of ferro-manganese and 70,000 tonnes of silico-manganese to meet SAIL's requirements for producing 24 MT of crude steel by 2010, it said.

Maharashtra Elektrosmelt Limited (MEL), a SAIL subsidiary, already supplies 55,000 tons of ferro-manganese and 44,500 tons of silico-manganese to the steel producer but it was unable to meet the total requirement of the public sector steel behemoth.