Acquisitions and joint ventures
The acquisition record starts small and gets large. In 2007 the company approved a joint venture steel rolling mill at Rustavi in Georgia at a project cost of about 42 million dollars, and the venture, Geo Steel, set up a plant with an initial capacity of 175,000 tonnes a year of rebar. JSW Steel held a stake in that venture for more than a decade before selling 39 per cent of it to Georgian Steel Group Holdings in 2020.[2]
Dolvi in 2010 was the first large purchase, at a reported value of about 3 billion dollars from Ispat Steel. It changed the company's scale and gave it a second integrated site, and it also left it with the Rengali downstream business that eventually became JSW Ispat Steel and was merged into the parent in 2020. Welspun Maxsteel followed in 2014 at about 1,000 crore rupees, and the two Welspun transactions together, the Salav plant in 2014 and the plates and coil mill division in 2021 for about 848.5 crore rupees, added both capacity and a shipping related product line.[5]
The insolvency purchases were the turning point. Bhushan Power and Steel was acquired in 2019 after a contested process in which lenders received about 19,350 crore rupees, and the Sambalpur plant it brought took the company past 20 million tonnes a year of capacity. The Bhushan case became a management case study, published later in the Asian Journal of Management Cases, on how a buyer should value a distressed steel asset. National Steel and Agro Industries followed in 2023, a much smaller acquisition of a company owing lenders more than 1,600 crore rupees, cleared by the National Company Law Tribunal.[8]
On the joint venture side, the partnership with JFE Steel of Japan began in 2009 with automotive steel and was extended in 2023 to an equal joint venture for cold rolled grain oriented electrical steel. JSW Steel also bought 51 per cent of Neotrex Steel from group promoters in 2021 to make low relaxation prestressed concrete products, and it took a 31 per cent stake in the home furnishings startup Ayena Innovation in 2023 through a subsidiary, a small investment that shows how the group tests consumer adjacencies.[10]
Italy is the longest running overseas story. In 2018 JSW Steel Italy bought Aferpi, Piombino Logistics and about 69 per cent of GSI Lucchini for roughly 55 million euros, and after years of uncertainty over contracts from the Italian railway authorities, the company signed an agreement with the Italian government in March 2024 to invest about 140 million euros in restarting production at Piombino, with plans to double rail making capacity at the site to 600,000 tonnes a year and produce rails of up to 120 metres.[1]
