Tata Steel and metaljunction recently signed an agreement whereby Tata Steel entrusted the collection and selling of a range of their secondary steel products, byproducts and obsolete capital goods and spares to MetalJunction. With the signing of this agreement, metaljunction has taken over the complete end-to-end responsibility. This was so far the responsibility of the secondary products division of Tata Steel.

With this step MetalJunction has added a new dimension to the services that it offers it clients. It now combines online selling over the Internet with a physical infrastructure of warehouses and the complete responsibility of logistics and payment collection. This ensures that whilst buyers get efficient delivery of products, sellers get immediate cash collection.

For Tata Steel, selling of secondary steel products was not a ‘core’ activity and it sought to bring in a partner that could unlock value by using information technology and the Internet to provide a higher level of service to their existing and new customers.

The value that MetalJunction would create / unlock for Tata Steel are:

• Reach: The ability to rapidly roll out products across a large geographical area without the associated infrastructure costs.

• Richness: The ability to augment the sales effort without hiring new employees or financing the infrastructure necessary to support those employees.

• Speed: Service all existing customer relationships and add new customers without adding to costs.

MetalJunction presents enterprises the opportunity to grow sales through a number of unique online sales channels that lower distribution costs, develop new markets, increase customer loyalty and integrate payments and logistics to provide a complete solution to the enterprise and its customers.

Coinciding with the taking over of the complete responsibility of selling which would involve warehousing and logistics, the ‘bricks’, MetalJunction has gone in for a name-change which better reflects its new role. The company which was incorporated as “MetalJunction.com Private Limited” has been rechristened “MetalJunction Services Limited”. It has also become a public limited company. But this will not lead to any change in the shareholding pattern. The company will continue to be equally owned by SAIL and Tata Steel as a 50:50 joint venture.