JSW Steel and POSCO to jointly build a steel plant in India

Leading Indian steel company JSW Steel has signed a preliminary agreement with South Korean corporation POSCO to build an integrated steel plant in India with a capacity of 5 million tons of steel per year. This was reported by Reuters.

The companies also plan to cooperate in the field of materials for electric vehicle batteries and develop renewable energy capacities for use at the future steel plant. According to Sajjan Jindal, Chairman of JSW Group, the partnership also involves the creation of infrastructure to support the construction of electric vehicles in India.

POSCO already has facilities in India: it owns a plant in Maharashtra, which annually produces 1.8 million tons of cold-rolled and galvanized steel for the Indian automotive sector. Earlier, the company abandoned the construction of a plant in Odisha, which was to be the largest foreign investment in India worth $12 billion. The project failed due to delays in land acquisition.

In 2022, POSCO also entered into a $5 billion deal with Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, which included the creation of a new steel plant in Gujarat.

As GMK Center reported earlier, JSW Steel plans to invest $1 billion in decarbonizing its facilities. This will contribute to the company’s ambition to become carbon neutral by 2050 and reduce CO2 emissions by 42% (1.95 tons of CO2 per ton of steel) by 2030.

Recently, the company announced that it will acquire a nearly 67% stake in an Australian private company for $120 million to expand its coal reserves. The deal is to buy a stake in M Res NSW, a subsidiary of the coal company M Resources.