Essar Steel plans JV in Vietnam

Essar Steel is tying up with Vietnam Steel Corporation to build a hot-rolled steel mill in Vietnam entailing an investment of $300-million.

The mill would be Vietnam's first to produce hot-rolled steel and would have a designed capacity of two million tonne per year.

The mill would be built in the southern province of Ba Ria-Vung Tau and construction would take about two years to be complete, said the country's Dau Tu newspaper quoting officials of the Vietnamese firm. Essar Steel officials were unavailable for comments.

The Vietnam project will be the Indian steel company's second major foray in the Southeast Asian region. The Essar Group, through its subsidiary PT Essar Indonesia, operates a hot-rolled coils manufacturing unit in Indonesia. The 0.4 million tonne per annum cold-rolling complex is one of the largest foreign greenfield investments undertaken by an Indian corporate group in Indonesia.

The plant incorporates the latest 6-Hi Hitachi mill from Japan and hydrogen annealing from Ebner, Austria. The plant includes a push-pull pickling line with an acid regeneration plant, electrolytic cleaning line, recoiling line, shearing and slitting line.

Vietnam Steel is the country's largest steel producer. Last year, the state-owned company had undertaken a $430 million project to mine about 5 million tonne of iron ore a year. The project is expected to help in its new venture with the Indian company.

The hot-rolled mill will also help Vietnam, which still relies heavily on steel billet imports mainly from China for its requirements. The country's overall imports of steel and billets in January and February totalled $286 million, almost 35.2 per cent down from a year earlier.