960402

Lahore re-rollers

blame PS

for crisis

HASEEB HAIDER

LAHORE: Steel re-rollers who are in hot water due to spiralling raw material prices by Rs 1000-1200 per ton owing to acute shortage, blame Pak Steel products of which are being sold at as premium in Karachi but are not available up-country.

"We use steel bars, angle iron, T-iron, etc for our manufacturing activity - but these days there is an acute shortage of these raw materials. As a result, the prices are up by Rs 1000-1200 per ton", an official of Pakistan Steel Re-rolling Mills Association (PSRMA) said. The industry which has a wide manufacturing base in Lahore was facing a desperate situation and finds no way out of it.

The raw materials for the industry uses are the mild steel billets, steel ingots and ship plate. The ship-plate is in very short supply owing to diminished ship-breaking activity, while the local steel melting furnaces which produce steel ingots were already in crisis and out of total 120 units, 80 were not operational, he said.

The Pakistan Steel Mills can meet only 25 percent of the nation's industrial requirement. "During the last three months, Pak Steel has supplied only just a fraction of the demand of 50 percent of the steel mills which applied for fresh registration as consumers", the PSRMA spokesman told Business Recorder.

He said in spite of numerous letters and meetings with Pak Steel, the situation was as it was regarding the availability of mild steel billets." In the last meeting the Pak Steel Chairman agreed to issue immediate notices of readiness (NORS) for balances of orders for October-December '95 quarter to be lifted by March 31. Additional quantities were promised on cash payment, and mill owners were wandering around in Pak Steel with begs full of cash but there was no action on the decisions made by chairman", the spokesman said.

Ironically, the steel industry official said, substantial quantities of mild steel billets were available at Karachi openly at a premium.

The main sufferers are the up-country mills which have the capacity and need to use more than double the production of Pak Steel.

"All this is the outcome of bureaucratic bungling and callous indifference", he charged. He said that the simple question was how could re-rolling mills entirely dependent on Pakistan Steel produce billets and survive?

The association has repeatedly drawn the attention of the government functionaries towards the critical situation developing since August '95 but there was hardly a positive response from them.