Japanese steel company JFE Steel Corporation and India’s JSW Steel Ltd have signed a collaboration agreement.
The pair said they would use each others strengths in the automotive industry, including production technologies and supply of substrate materials for hot rolled, cold rolled and galvanized products.
Other areas of collaboration include energy reduction and environmental programmes, audits of JSW facilities, buying raw materials in and outside of India and mutual stockholding.
JSW Steel is one of the fastest growing steel companies in the world and is expanding its production capacity to 11Mt/y by 2011 from 7.8Mt/y currently. It achieved volume growth of 54% in crude steel production and 74% in saleable steel during the second quarter of FY 09-10.
It is also poised to become a major player in the value added segment of products. Its extra wide hot strip mill will be ready by March 2010. The company has plans to expand its capacity to 32Mt/y by 2020 by setting up Greenfield projects of 10Mt/y each in Jharkhand and West Bengal.
JFE is the second largest steel company in Japan with production of 33Mt, and ranks sixth in the world. It is aiming to secure a local production base to serve customers in the high-growth Indian market.
JFE Steel achieved net sales of more than JPY3.4 trillion ($38.5bn) and ordinary income of JPY413bn ($4.67bn) for the fiscal year ended 31 March 2009.