The plant is capable of producing 30,000 tonne of head hardened rail a month and it aims to substitute imports, which metro rail developers were forced to use till now.
“The declared metro rail projects itself give us a market of 0.5 million tonne over the next two-three years. With this new line of product, we expect that our rail business will yield ₹200 crore of revenues a month from this fiscal (2016-17) compared to ₹45 crore a month in the previous fiscal,” said Ravi Uppal, Managing Director and Group Chief Executive Officer, Jindal Steel and Power Ltd.
Uppal said that currently, the landed price of imported head hardened rails is around ₹75,000 per tonne, while normal rails which are imported costs ₹50-55,000 per tonne.
“We would aim to bring down this cost difference. Apart from getting head hardened rail at a cheaper price, buyers can also benefit from shorter delivery times and would also be able to order as much as they need rather than bulk orders which they need to place for imports,” he added.
JSPL expects its entire rail business to contribute ₹1,800-2,000 crore to its revenues during the 2016-17 fiscal which would be scaled up to over ₹3,300 crore over the next two-three years.
Already the company’s order book for normal rails is 3 lakh tonne, which will be delivered over the next few months.
Head hardened rails are typically used in metro rail projects and high speed freight corridors.
Head hardening technology entails a special heat treatment process which requires precise temperature control to achieve nearly 50 per cent higher hardness as compared to a normal rail.
