Manufacturing facility to be developed inSingur

Kolkata: Tata Ryerson Ltd, which has been chosen as the sole supplier of six components for the Nano small car, is setting up a manufacturing facility at the vendors’ park in Singur at an estimated investment of Rs 100 crore.

Being set up on 10 acres, the facility will be commissioned by October, according to Mr Sandipan Chakravortty, Managing Director of Tata Ryerson Ltd.

Mr Chakravortty told newspersons here that the Singur plant would manufacture the “load carrying members” of the Nano car. He explained that the load carrying members were the “foundation on which the car would sit”.

According to him, the Tata small car factory at Singur would have a capacity to manufacture 5,00,000 units of the Nano per annum.

The Tata Ryerson facility, too, would be equipped “to support” the production of 5,00,000 Nano cars per annum. In volume terms, this would mean handling 1,50,000 tonnes of steel every year. On one-shift basis, the plant would engage around 40 skilled workers.

Mr Chakravortty said another vendor unit was being set up at Pantnagar in Uttarakhand where Tata Motors was setting up a facility to manufacture the small commercial vehicle “Ace”. The investment in the Pantnagar facility had been pegged at Rs 45 crore. To cater to the needs of earthmoving and construction equipment industry, Tata Ryerson was setting up a plate burning and fabrication unit at Tada in Andhra Pradesh in association with Caterpillar of the US. The investment in the unit would be Rs 45 crore as well, he said, adding that all investments in the pipeline would be funded from internal accruals and bank borrowings.

Tata Ryerson is augmenting its steel processing and distribution capacity to two million tonnes per annum by 2010. The company hopes to end the current fiscal with a turnover of around Rs 1,200 crore. Last fiscal, the company recorded a turnover of around Rs 1,000 crore, Mr Chakravortty said.