'Indian CEOs spend more time in addressing regulatory issues'

NEW DELHI: Stating that Indian CEOs spend more time in addressing regulatory issues than their global peers, Tata Steel India Managing Director T V Narendran, however, defended regulators, saying industry has invited this scrutiny to some extent.

"CEOs in India spend far more time addressing regulatory issues than CEOs in other countries do. To be fair to the regulators, the industry has invited this scrutiny to an extent," Narendran has said in an interview to Tata Review, an inhouse magazine. "There is a need for the industry to look at responsible growth and be good corporate citizens," he added.

Narendran, however, also pitched for simplification of regulations to support to attract investors (in steel sector) and tight enough to ensure communities are not exploited. Stating that in the next two years, the demand for steel in India is expected to grow to about 180-200 million tonnes (MT), capacity of an additional 100 MT has to be built, for which we need to spend approximately US $ 100 billion.

"Very few countries in the world have both the raw material and the market. India has both. But if we don't leverage this opportunity to translate the richness below the ground to opportunities above the ground, then we will be missing out," he said.

Narendran said Tata Steel intends to add 1 MT capacity of every year in India and plans to raise the capacity in South East Asia by 2 MT to 6 MT. Tata Steel has recently increased annual capacity of its Jamshedpur plant in India to 10 MT. The first phase of the Kalinganagar plant in Odisha with 3 mtpa capacity would go on stream in the last quarter of the year.

"In South East Asia, we will continue to go downstream, setting up facilities in Indonesia, Malaysia and Hong Kong. We are currently at 4 MT of sales in this region and I would like to take that to 5 to 6 MT," he said.

As countries such as Vietnam, the Philippines and Myanmar are still at an early stage of steel consumption, Narendran said, "We have huge opportunities to tap. The key is in going about it in an integrated fashion."