Vedanta appoints Cairie as head for Metals business in India

Metals and mining conglomerate Vedanta Ltd today appointed Samir Cairae as CEO of the Metals division in India.
Cairae has been appointed as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Diversified Metals (India). He will report to Vedanta Resources Plc CEO Tom Albanese and will also be a member of the Vedanta Executive Committee team, the firm led by NRI billionaire Anil Agarwal said in a statement.
An electrical engineer from IIT-Kanpur, Cairae has held various leadership positions at Lafarge and Schlumberger in the past, it added.
Albanese said: "Samir will provide operational and strategic leadership for the performance of Vedanta Ltd's Aluminium, India Copper, Power, Iron Ore divisions in addition to Commercial and Asset optimisation functions."

Vedanta said the appointment is a part of the Senior Leadership key initiatives undertaken by the firm's Human Resource for acquiring global talent to take the diversified metals-to-oil group to new heights.
In September, Vedanta Resources had appointed Cynthia Carroll as the Chair of Vedanta Resources Holdings Ltd.

Agarwal is hopeful that commodity prices will be
"settling down" in 2016 and will start to recover next year. Zinc will recover the fastest and aluminium will be the next, he added.
His companies are India's biggest producers of zinc, copper and aluminum and have been battered by slumping commodity prices globally.

The group has cut costs and has reduced overall expenditure by 25-30 per cent without any significant job cuts, he said. "I am one person who does not believe in cutting jobs," he stressed.
Cost cutting and operational efficiencies have brought in savings of Rs 8,000-9,000 crore annually, he let out.
Agarwal suggested that the government should aggressively allow mining of underground wealth -- from oil to uranium, gold, zinc and potash.
"It pains me to see that India has huge prospects for all of these, but still we have to import. We just need to find them. The government should keep things simple. Let 15 more companies come and find resources, produce them and make profit. The government should only look at safeguarding revenue and environment," he said.

Agarwal made it clear that his group will continue to invest since time is now to create capacities as services and other costs were low.
"We will spend over USD 2 billion in the next two years, mostly in oil and gas, if some government clearances that we expect come through," he said.
Known as the acquisition man who bought loss-making government firms like Balco and Hindustan Zinc and turned them around, Agarwal said his group is "open to acquisitions if any opportunity comes by though there is nothing specific in hand at the moment".
Asked if he would play the white knight for Tata Steel's UK plants, he said, "I am not interested. Why? One can do better things with that kind of money."

Vedanta, in 2011, acquired Cairn India to gain access to the country's biggest on-shore oil field. The firm is now being merged with its parent and Agarwal hoped the merger to go through by May-end.