Corus to be unlisted from April: Tata Steel
Mid-Day — March 5, 2007

While discussing the Tata-Corus deal, at the Tata Steel centenary celebrations in Jamshedpur last week, Chairman Ratan Tata said that they were not planning a listing in an overseas market just yet. "I think in terms of the present schedule, we should be the owners of Corus stock sometime in early April, if the shareholders pass or accept our bid in a meeting that is scheduled to take place next Wednesday," he said. Corus will be an unlisted company held by one of Tata Steel's subsidiaries on a 100 per cent basis.

So it will become an unlisted company from that time onwards, which is the first week of April, said officials. But when asked why the group had chosen Corus, Tata instantly replied, "Why Corus? Corus is unique in the sense that it is a company that has a scale of 19 million tonnes currently; has a presence in Europe with a brand name and it was a company where we believed that we shared the same values systems between their management and ours." He continued, "We have always had a view that we will not engage in a hostile takeover.

"In the case of Corus, the offer we made to the Corus management was the offer that was contingent on the board and the management was unanimously supporting our bid and recommending this to the shareholders. So this is a joining of hands in mutual concept and therefore, it was attractive to us. It has elevated us to be the fifth largest company, that's secondary. What we wanted to do is to synergistically grow our company to a global scale." Throwing more light on the kind of synergies that Tata Steel sees with Corus, MD of Tata Steel, B Muthuraman said, "What we would like to do is to ensure that all other synergies are extracted and maximised as quickly as possible and there are synergies in manufacturing, in search and development and in marketing area."

"In fact, we and the Corus team sat together and worked out the synergies that we would be able to create over 2-3 years and the figure of USD 350 million (Rs 1,543 crore) I mentioned in the last conference, came out of that," he added. When asked about the price paid for Corus, he admitted that the price was high. "We paid a higher price than we had expected. We did not reach the level of cut-off that we had internally set ourselves. But it is still within the realm of a price that we believe we can justify. We believe that history will say that we did the right thing even though at that time it seems like a high price," said Tata.

"I think the celebration, if any, ought to come when we prove to our critics that we achieved this without hurting the stakeholders of Tata Steel in anyway, and enhancing great value to them in the course of time," said Tata.