India’s JSW Steel Limited will acquire coal mining firm Minas de Reveboe (MDR) in Mozambique, picking up a 92 percent equity stake entailing an investment of around $74 million, a company official said on Tuesday, May 21.
The acquisition of the coal mining company will give JSW Steel Limited access to around 800 million mt of premium hard coking coal reserves in Mozambique, the official said. The mines held by MDR are not yet operational, but JSW Steel is aiming to start developing the assets from the fiscal year 2024-25, he said.
“The coal assets will provide us some cushioning with respect to the highly volatile [premium low-volatile (PLV)] index,” JSW Steel CEO Jayant Acharya said. “It also is logistically closer to India, and therefore will give us an optimised cost,” he added.
The company is exploring options of acquiring a 20 percent equity stake in Australia’s Whitehaven Coal’s Blackwater coal mine, valued between $750 million and $1 billion.
JSW Steel has lined up capital expenditure of around $7.71 billion over the next three years to take the group’s total steelmaking installed capacity to 42 million mt per year, which includes ongoing capacity expansion of mills at Vijaynagar, Jharsuguda and Bhushan Power and Steel Limited.