Board Committee proposes options to restart Pakistan Steel Mills

January 18, 2019: The meeting of the Board Business Development Committee (BDC) of Pakistan Steel Mills (PSM) was held on 16th and 17th January 2019 at Pakistan Steel Karachi after delinking of PSM from Privatization. The meeting was chaired by Mr. Mohammad Raziuddin, Chairman Board BDC. The Committee made extensive deliberations on possible options to restart PSM.

The Committee appreciated the political philosophy of the present Government towards the need of re-operationalization of PSM, considering the PSM, the only primary steel manufacturing plant in the country, which has national strategic value and its operationalization will help in contributing to the Large Scale Manufacturing (LSM) growth number, besides serving the need of downstream industry.

The Committee discussed various options to restart PSM, which have higher probability of financial sustainability, least cost, and early restart while keeping the present Human Resource intact. The Committee observed that the Blast Furnaces have been adversely damaged primarily due to abrupt closure of supply of natural gas in 2015. Due to this, it is estimated that the major capital repairs including replacement of two blast furnaces is the major cost component of repairs and replacement of plants and equipment of PSM.

The Committee extensively discussed the repairs required for each and every unit of the PSM for production restoring to 1 million tons per year extending it to 3 million tons as per demand in the country in view of increasing demand of steel in the country. The Committee while extensively discussing the required needs for the rehabilitation of the plant for bringing it back to the initial production capacity of the mill considered various options of resources for consideration of ECC.

The Committee also discussed hiring of CEO and CFO on urgent basis, as well as offers from various parties desiring to participate in rehabilitation of PSM.