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Essar Group

Type	Private
Industry	Conglomerate
Founded	1969
Founder(s)	Shashi Ruia Ravi Ruia
Headquarters	Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Shashi Ruia[1] (Chairman) Ravi Ruia[1] (Vice-Chairman) Prashant Ruia[1] (Group CEO)
Products	Steel, oil and gas, power, communications, shipping, ports and logistics, projects, mineral, Real estates
Revenue	US$ 17 billion (2011)[2]
Profit	US$ 2 billion (2011)[2]
Employees	75,000 (2011)
Subsidiaries	Essar Steel, Essar Steel Algoma, Essar Oil, Essar Shipping, Essar Hypermart, The MobileStore
Website	www.essar.com

Essar Group is an Indian multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered at Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. The company has presence in sectors like steel, energy, power, communications, shipping ports, logistics and construction. Today, the Group continues to expand its global footprint, focusing on markets in Asia, Africa, Europe, the Americas and Australia.

^[2]

Essar began as a construction company in 1969 and diversified into manufacturing, services and retail. Essar is managed by Shashi Ruia, Chairman – Essar Group and Ravi Ruia, Vice Chairman Essar Group.^[3]

Essar invests in the latest technology to drive forward and backward integration in its businesses, and integrating its businesses through a holistic approach. It uses on research and innovation to help manufacture low-cost, high-quality and innovative customer offerings.

As part of its social responsibility initiatives, the Group runs community outreach initiatives at all its plant locations, with a focus on education, healthcare, environmental and agricultural development, and self-employment.

History[link]

Essar Group began its first operation with the construction of an outer breakwater in Chennai port. The Company was incorporated in June 1976 under the name of Essar Construction Limited and was engaged primarily in core sector activities, including marine construction, pipeline laying, dredging and other port related activities. In 1984, the Company ventured further into other core sectors mainly the field of exploration and development, drilling onshore and offshore oil and gas wells for Indian Public Sector oil exploration companies. In view of this the Company's name was then changed to Essar Offshore and Exploration Limited in May 1987.

In August 1987, the Company's name was changed to Essar Gujarat Limited, to reflect its highly diversified business interest. In 1988, the Company made an initial public offer for its shares, which are now listed in Bombay Stock Exchange, National Stock Exchange of India and two other Indian stock exchanges.

In the 1990s the group entered into steel making with its Hazira plant in Gujarat and a pellet plant in Visakhapatnam. During the same decade the Essar Group expanded its scope into other businesses gas exploration, oil refinery, construction and GSM telephony.

As part of its business strategy of focusing on the iron and steel sector, the Company hived off its unrelated business to a series of different companies, which remain in the Group. Offshore and energy operations were transferred to Essar Oil Limited in May 1992, Civil and mechanical construction business were transferred to Essar Projects Limited in March 1993.

With a vertical integration program in mind, construction of a world-class state-of-the-art technology Hot Rolled (HR) sheets and coil plant began in 1992. The plan commenced trial production in April 1995 and commercial production in April 1996.

To reflect its business strategy of focusing on steel making operations, the name of the Company was changed from Essar Gujarat Limited to Essar Steel Limited in December 1995. The Company operates the following facilities at Hazira, Gujarat state. 3.4 MMTPA gas based Hot Briquetted Iron (HBI) plant; 2.4 MMTPA Hot Rolled Coils (HRC) plant

The plant has requisite infrastructure like captive jetty, assured power supply, captive lime and oxygen plants and quality raw material from HBI plant. The products conform to quality requirements of international rating agencies like TÜV Rheinland, Lloyds Register, American Petroleum Institute etc. This is the first steel plant in India to receive ISO 14001 certification for the best environment management.

Over the last few years the group has been expanding its businesses geographically as well.

Steel[link]

Essar Steel is a global steel company with presence in India, Canada, USA, the Middle East and Asia. It has an annual capacity of 14 million tonnes and plans to scale it to 20-25 million tonnes. The product portfolio includes pipes, plates cold rolling, galvanizing and pre-coated segments.

It is India's largest exporter of flat steel with 10 million tons per annum (MTPA) of capacity in India and 4 million tons per annum (MTPA)in world wide facility.^[4] Essar Steel is fully integrated from mining to retail and has strong downstream capability with a global retail capacity of over 3 MTPA.

Essar Minerals owns iron ore and coal mines in India, Indonesia, Mozambique and the USA. The company has access to over 1.6 billion tonnes of iron ore reserves and 450 million tonnes of coal reserves. Detailed listing of all units that comprise Essar Steel India

Energy[link]

Essar Energy is a low-cost, integrated energy company focused on India. They have a track-record and assests worth US$12 billion across the power and oil and gas industries. After its Intial Public Offer (IPO), Essar Power and Essar Oil was enlisted in the London Stock Exchange in 2010

Essar Oil has an international presence across the hydrocarbon value chain from exploration and production to oil retail. The company has access to a global portfolio of onshore and offshore oil and gas blocks with about 45,000 sq km available for exploration. The refineries are Vadinar in Gujarat India; Stanlow in Cheshire, United Kingdom and 50% controlling stake in Kenya Petroleum Refineries. Essar also has 1600 oil retail outlets in various parts of India.

Essar Power has a current generation capacity of 1,600 MW, which is spread across five power plants in India and Canada. They also own about 800 million tonnes of coal reserves and resources in blocks spread across four continents.

Essar Energy, approximately 76% owned by Essar Group, is today India's fifth largest power generation company in the private sector after Tata Power, Lanco Power, Adani Power and JSW Energy.^{[citation needed]} Its current generation capacity of 1,600 MW is being expanded to 8,070 MW.^{[citation needed]} With a portfolio of gas, coal and liquid fuel based power plants, Essar Energy is among the lowest cost power producers. It has also entered the transmission and distribution sectors in India where it has quickly built a strong presence.^{[citation needed]}It is market leader in western India. Essar Energy holds a controlling stake in Essar Oil.

Existing and upcoming plants[link]

Essar Power operates five power plants with a combined capacity of 1,200 MW in three locations across India. Including two gas-based plants and one liquid fuel based plant in Hazira, a co-generation plant in Vadinar and a coal-based plant in Visakhapatnam.Two 1200 MW power plants in Tori,Jharkhand and Mahan, M.P.^[5]

Services[link]

Under the services domain, the group caters to shipping, business process outsourcing (BPO), telecom and realty.

Essar Shipping is an integrated logistics solution provider with a presence in sea transportation, logistics and oilfield services. The company currently has a fleet of 27 vessels, with an additional 12 new ships on order. It provides contract drilling services to Oil companies across the globe, with a fleet of 12 onshore rigs and one semi-submersible offshore rig; and two new jack-up rigs on order.

Aegis is Essar’s BPO arm and caters to clients in the telecom, BFSI, travel and hospitality, consumer goods, retail and healthcare domains as well as engineering services; across 12 countries.

Essar Communications is a global player with a presence in telecom services, consumer durables and IT retail. Yu, its GSM-based mobile services network in Kenya; in the telecom retail space, the MobileStore which has over 900 retail stores across India. Essar Communications under its telecom services has over 140 million subscribers in India, Kenya, Uganda and Congo.

Equinox Realty has operations in the Indian state of Maharashtra, Karnataka, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh; and has a portfolio of approximately 16 million sq ft

Infrastructure[link]

The group’s infrastructure scope falls under managing ports. They have also been involved in handling complex engineering, procurement and construction projects.

Essar Ports has an existing capacity of 88 MMTPA across two facilities Vadinar and Hazira in Gujarat, India; making it one of the largest owners and operators of ports in India.

Essar Projects is the second largest engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) company in India. It operates under sectors of steel, oil, gas, power, ports and terminals.

Other Businesses[link]

Essar Group has plans to expand into other key sectors. Its other businesses include

Information Technology The Essar Group deploys a host of IT systems which will enable their companies to compete as per global standards

Publishing Paprika Media has tied up with the UK-based publishing company, TimeOut, to publish the Indian edition of the magazine.

Agribusiness Essar Agrotech deals in growing of flowers, herbs and vegetables primarily for international markets.

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official website
• Shashi & Ravi Ruia Profile at Forbes