Now with L N Mittal baring his teeth to bite into the apple called Arcelor, a successful takeover may lead to a precarious situation for Tata Steel.
L N Mittal's audacious USD 22.0 bn bid for steel giant Arcelor must have left the top management in a pensive mood. Arcelor is an important joint-venture partner in Tata Steel's ambitious automotive steels foray.
The Indian steel major has major plans for the automotive steels segment and has been quite aggressive in winning new business from Indian carmakers. Tata Steel now has a supply contract with most Indian carmakers including Maruti, Hyundai, Hyundai, Honda and Ford, a position of strength built nearly entirely in the last five years.
Arcelor, along with Nippon Steel is the strength of Tata Steel's automotive foray. The joint-venture with Arcelor signed in July 2003 granted Tata Steel license to Arcelor's Hot Dip Galvanised (HDG) products. Further, behind the scenes work was going on regarding the development of low cost speciality automotive steels for critical applications like fuel tanks (a major chunk of these steels are still imported) and also helping Tata Steel venture into the halo legion of laser welded Tailored Blanks.
For more details on Tata steel visit http://www.theautodiary.com/
Maruti is 21
To its credit, Maruti today is as good, if not better, than the other players in the country in any competitive area, from capacity utilization to efficiency.
Surveys, surveys and more surveys
MUL in the Indian market is perhaps the only case in the world of a market leader, that too with an unabashed 55-percent of the marketshare, sweeping the customer satisfaction surveys.
Hyundai Getz
On a side note, the Getz TV promo is simply ludicrous.
