Indian-origin UK family buys Lord Paul's Caparo unit

Hundreds of jobs have been saved at steel firm Caparo Industries owned by noted NRI industrialist Lord Swraj Paul after a UK-based Indian-origin family acquired one of its units.
The Gupta family, which owns metals company Liberty House Group, acquired Caparo Tubular Solutions, a core division of Caparo Industries plc.
In October, Lord Paul's Caparo announced around 452 jobs may have to go across the country, including 300 in the West Midlands, after it entered into administration.
A total of 76 jobs in the West Midlands and south of England were saved last week when PwC confirmed Caparo Testing Technologies had been sold.

The announcement today brings the total number of jobs saved at the company to 409.
Robert Moran, partner at PwC, said: "The sale of Caparo Tubular Solutions is a major boost for the Midlands economy, the employees of Caparo and more widely for the UK steel industry. This deal preserves all 333 jobs at Caparo Tubular Solutions, which manufactures, distributes and supplies advanced tube components and parts for the automotive and aerospace industries in the West Midlands and South Wales".

The Gupta family concluded talks with administrators PwC and said thatLiberty sees the multi-product Caparo tube businesses, headquartered at Oldbury in the West Midlands region of England, as a complement to its own hot rolled coil production, centred in Newport, South Wales.

"There are many natural synergies between our hot rolled coil production business and Caparo's design, manufacture and distribution of steel tube and various specialist engineering products," said Sanjeev Gupta, chief executive of Liberty.
"They are established customers for our product and we have, in fact, looked at them in the past about the possibility of integrating the two businesses in order to help create a comprehensive and robust new model for the steel sector in the UK. We now aim to achieve that objective.
"This, together with the new initiatives now supported by
the government to lower energy costs for energy intensive industries, provides an opportunity for UK steel once again to be competitive.

"Caparo Tubular Solutions was a fundamentally profitable business with substantial, sustainable value, and we were very attracted to its highly-skilled management and workforce, extensive distribution network and top-quality customer base," Gupta said.
Liberty recently restarted hot rolled coil production at its rolling mill in Newport, South Wales.
The company imports steel slab through Newport for rolling on site but is also considering the possibility of producing slab from domestic steel scrap at the same plant, which has an existing arc furnace.
With the recent reactivation of the Liberty Steel facility in Newport, South Wales, the Liberty Group's global steel production capacity now exceeds 4 million tonnes per annum.