Mr Mika Seitovirta, CEO of Finnish stainless steel giant Outokumpu, is closely watching the Indian market. He feels India will emerge as a major market in the long term.
Since joining office in April 2011, Mr Seitovirta has been devoting his energy to supervising the €2.7 billion acquisition of Inoxum, the stainless unit of the German conglomerate, ThyssenKrupp.
The acquisition has created a very large stainless steel maker, with approximately 19,000 employees and global market share of about 14 per cent. It has annual cold rolling capacity exceeding 3.5 million tonnes.
In an interaction with
What are Outokumpu's India plans?
We have just acquired Inoxum and it has satiated our appetite for now. We are keen to service our joint customer base and leverage the synergies arising from the acquisition. However, we are closely watching India as it will emerge a major market in long term.
But in the short term, we are not looking at any major acquisitions.
However, we are keeping our options open. We could look at joint ventures for our India operations in the future. Nothing is excluded from our agenda.
Are you looking to scale up India and Asia-Pacific operations?
Already both Outokumpu and Inoxum have India operations through sales offices. We are looking at more cross selling opportunities with Inoxum joining us. Our joint product portfolio would be very competitive in the Indian market.
Today, if you look at the stainless steel market, about 60 per cent of the global demand is from the Asia-Pacific region. We might restructure our operations in Europe, but in APAC the demand is very bullish. Of our total revenue of $ 5 billion last year, APAC had contributed about 12 per cent.
In the Indian market, there are lobbies which want anti-dumping duty on imported steel. How is Outokumpu tackling this?
We want to bring the latest products to Indian customers. But at times we get entangled in anti-dumping issues. It is something which we could do without. Eventually, other players will realise that they can only increase their market share by giving competitive products to theirs customers.