Coal India has a plan to sell a 10% company stake and gain a listing on the Bombay Stock Exchange.
The producer is also weighing up a deal on a coal project to the north of Perth, Western Australia, as well as seriously considering 39 proposals drawn from an expression of interest it put out to the market this year.
Chairman Partha Battacharyya told International Longwall News at the Austmine conference that many of those proposals were from Australian companies.
The coal giant’s plans to grow its 404 million tonne per annum coal production to 520.5Mtpa by 2012 could open another door for Australian contract miner Thiess.
Thiess has been patiently trying to break into the Indian coal market for some time. The company won a contract there, only to have it held up by the global financial crisis.
It also is in the running for a contract with National Thermal Power Corporation, a major Indian coal producer.
Battacharyya said Coal India would be tendering some major mining contracts in the next three to six months and that Thiess would be considered.
He said it would be up against other Indian contractors, such as a joint venture between Indian earthmoving equipment maker Beml and a company called Midwest.
Thiess is certainly no stranger to adversity in its moves into foreign markets. It took four-and-a-half hard years before the company started to get traction in the Indonesian market. It has been there for 25 years.
Coal India’s contract mining move has been driven by its need to further boost productivity to help meet India’s coal demand.
It also is looking beyond India for projects. It has secured two blocks in Mozambique and put out an expression of interest for coal supply options. The company wants to secure coal supply for less than India is paying for its coal imports.
“We called for expressions of interest [to help with securing coal supply] and received 58 responses,” Battacharyya said. “Of those we’re looking seriously at 39 and quite a few Australian companies are in that.”
Coal India has a healthy amount of cash and is looking to use that to invest in the Australian market too.
“We’re looking at something to the north of Perth but I can’t say anymore about it because of confidentiality agreements,” Battacharyya said.
The softly spoken Indian executive has been with Coal India for 32 of its 34 years. He has seen it go through some turbulent times in the midst of the nationalisation push the Indian government set out in the 1970s.
The Indian government realised that it was more reliant on coal than many other economies. When the energy shocks hit in the early 1970s, it decided it had to be coal at all costs.
Coal India came into being on November 1, 1975, and has been in government hands ever since.
Battacharyya has helped take Coal India from a deeply indebted coal producer to a company that paid its owner $US1.24 billion in dividends and tax on its profits. Next year it will take the big step of leaving full government ownership.
“Ten per cent of the company will be divested for the purpose of listing the company on the Bombay Stock Exchange,” Battacharyya said. “The [Indian] government will retain a 90 per cent share.”
