Essar Steel becomes first Indian company to supply plates for warships

New Delhi: Essar Steel said Thursday it had become the first Indian producer to be approved by the government to supply steel plates to the Indian Navy for building warships. The heavy plates will be used for manufacturing state-of-the art naval ships.

"Essar Steel's plate mill became the first primer plate producer in the country to be recognized for indigenous development of steel for building ships for the Indian Navy…The company has received a prestigious order from Mazagoan Dock (MDL) to supply 13,000 tonnes of heavy plates," the company said in a statement.

This is the first time that MDL has placed an order for such a large consignment of steel plates from a domestic steel mill.

The order, the company said, follows a "stringent mill audit of Essar Steel's recently commissioned wide-plate mill conducted by teams from the Directorate of Naval Architecture (DNA), Defence Metallurgical Research Laboratory (DMRL) and the Director General of Quality Assurance (DGQA) of the Ministry of Defence."

Essar's plate mill, set up at a cost of Rs2,000 crore, has an annual production capacity of 1.5 million tonnes. The mill, which uses technology sourced from Siemens Voest Alpine, is the only steel mill in the country capable of producing 5-m wide plates conforming to global standards.

Such plates find applications in diverse segments, including defence, oil and gas, boilers and pressure vessels, heavy duty earth-moving machines, wind towers, mine protective vehicles and construction.

Essar Steel said it received the order after a stringent mill audit conducted by teams from the Directorate of Naval Architecture (DNA), Defence Metallurgical Research Laboratory (DMRL) and the Director General of Quality Assurance (DGQA) of the ministry of defence.