| Tata Steel Plans New Jamshedpur Airport |
India’s Tata Steel, which celebrated 100 years in business this weekend, is building a new airport to link the steel city of Jamshedpur in the east to other parts of the country.
“We believe in green-field projects that serve long-term requirements rather than to meet short-term demand. Tata Steel will continue to upgrade the infrastructure in Jamshedpur and a new airport is part of the blueprint,” Tata Steel Managing Director B. Muthuraman told the media in Jamshedpur.
The city, in the mineral-rich Indian state of Jharkhand, is also home to companies like Tata Motors (nyse: TTM - news - people ), Lafarge Cement (nyse: LR - news - people ), Timken (nyse: TKR - news - people ) India, Tata Robins Fraser and Indian Steel and Wire Products.
On Sunday, leading low-cost airline Air Deccan launched a daily flight from Calcutta to Jamshedpur, where Tata Steel produces about 6 million tons of steel.
Tata, India’s largest private steel maker, plans to underwrite a percentage of the seats on each flight to make operations viable for Air Deccan, which travels to the largest number of Indian destinations of any airline. (See: “ Taking India Aloft”) Jamshedpur already has an airport, but Muthuraman was quoted as saying there were restrictions preventing upgrading it, so the company had decided to build a new one.
As Indian companies spread their operations beyond the major cities, the lack of transportation infrastructure is a huge obstacle. India’s congested airports are estimated to need $9 billion over five years to expand.
Tata Steel, which is the world’s sixth-largest steel maker after acquiring Anglo-Dutch giant Corus in January for $12.9 billion, will soon submit its construction proposal to the Jharkhand state government. The airport will have a runway of about 7,500 feet to enable larger Boeing and Airbus aircraft to taxi in.
Jamshedpur, India’s first planned industrial township, was renamed after Tata Steel founder Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata in 1919. Tata Steel operated India’s first steel plant, with a capacity of 100,000 tons. The company’s annual production is now 26 million tons, and it plans to double that by 2015.
http://www.forbes.com/markets/2007/08/27/tata-steel-airport-markets-equity-cx_rd_0827markets01.html |
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