Tata Steel has urged the Government to consider concrete steps like imposing safeguard and anti-dumping duties than taking piece-meal measures like increasing import duty at regular intervals.
Reacting to the import duty hike of 2.5 per cent on long products and billets to 7.5 per cent on Wednesday, TV Narendran, Managing Director, Tata Steel, said such measures only discourage speculative position taken on imports like it happened in April when flat product duty was hiked but the preceding months imports started peaking and has touched a million tonne per month now.
The recent decision of the Chinese government to devalue yuan will more than negate India's duty hike and help them dump steel into India, he said speaking to media on sideline of the company's AGM on Wednesday.
India should learn from countries like the US and others who take swift decision on safeguard duty and also announce that when implemented it will be with retrospective effect from the day when investigation started to implement the duty.
On mining, he said operations at Noamundi iron ore mine are suspended and the case would come up for hearing in the High Court on September 8.
With price of owning a mine becoming expensive and iron ore prices falling, the cost advantage Tata Steel was enjoying has shrunk, he said.
If the Government wants to have 150 million tonnes of steel production capacity in India, it should ensure the interest of the industry is protected as it is a capital-intensive sector, he said.
Tata Steel plans to invest ₹10,000 crore this fiscal. Of this 50 per cent will be in India.
Earlier addressing shareholders at the company’s AGM, Cyrus Mistry, Chairman, Tata Steel, said China has set up steel production capacity of 1 billion tonnes and the capacity utilisation of these plants are 70 per cent. This means there is an excess capacity of 100 million tonnes which is a significant part of global overcapacity, he said.
In 2014, China steel export was 100 million tonnes and the current year it is expected to be 25 per cent more.