Indian Metals & Ferro Alloys Ltd is one of the largest fully integrated ferro chrome producers in India. D K Mohanty, Vice President of the company details on the company’s mining, production and logistics operations
Q Please give a brief outline about the initial journey of the company? Which are your markets?
IMFA was established in 1960s with one 10MVA plant to produce Ferro Silicon at Therubali and subsequently added 2 more furnaces at Therubali and also produced Silicon Metal & silicon alloys in different times. Later, IMFA took over Kalinga Tubes situated at Choudwar in Odisha where it set up furnaces and power plant to produce Ferro chrome. With allocation of captive chromite mines in 1999, we started shifting more towards producing Ferro Chrome as Ferro Silicon was more power intensive. Currently, we have ferro alloys production capacity of 187 MVA to produce around 2,75,000 tonnes of Ferro Chrome.
While our orientation is always towards exports, we sell 20 per cent in the domestic market. We have a joint-venture with Posco of South Korea. There are also agreements with companies in Japan, Taiwan and China. Low phos low ash coke / coal are only being imported for meeting our export requirement as the same are not available indigenously. Currently, to produce around 2,30,000-2,50,000 of ferro chrome.
around 1,30,000 tonnes of coke and coal is imported through Paradip Port. Our exports move through Visakhapatnam, while break bulk shipment goes through Paradip. In FY-17, we exported around 2,05,000 tonnes, out of which about 80,000 tonne was in break bulk form, balance in containers and sold about 30,000 tonnes in domestic market. Movement to ports is by road. We do not move material by rail as it involves multiple handling which gives scope for material degradation.
Q What are the logistic related challenges before the company?
For our Choudwar unit, chrome ore is moved by trucks from our mines situated at a distance of about 120 kms, also with least logistic cost. However, for our Therubali unit, multi-modal transport model is adapted as the distance from mines is more than 500km. India has less than 1 per cent of world’s chromite ore reserve and majority of the deposit is found at the Sukinda Valley. Considering all major chromite mines in Sukinda Valley, out bound truck requirement is very high, hence, truck availability becomes an issue at times.
Q How has been the experience dealing with ports?
We don’t face much difficulty at Paradip as the company has plots where cargo is stored and every month one shipment of about 7,000-8,000 tonnes is moved out. But when overall export volume in general increases from the port, there are delays related to weighment at times but we manage with weighment at other weigh bridges. At Visakhapatnam, our containers are moved by freight forwarders and at times availability of containers remains an issue.
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