“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” For Abhyuday Jindal, Managing Director of Jindal Stainless Ltd. (JSL), the iconic lines from Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities sum up the period when he joined the company 10 years ago.
The metal industry was going through a downturn. “But, if I may say so, it was one of the best experiences, because if you come when everything is very good, there’s not much you can get involved in,” Jindal, 35, recalls. Joining during the period of turmoil allowed him to get his hands dirty, jump right in to work out the problems plaguing the company and the sector, and listen to customers, suppliers and employees on the company’s challenges and strengths.
Over the past 10 years, Jindal has managed not just to understand the company and the sector but also lay out a blueprint for the future, be it in terms of creating more awareness about stainless steel, investing in renewable capacity and sustainability, or charting out an ambitious expansion plan.
The formative experience has stood Jindal in good stead. He remains relatively unfazed by the threat of the tariff war that US President Donald Trump has unleashed.
“There has been a dip in our exports over the last three to four years, but because of our long customer relationships, we are still catering to all of them,” he says. He adds the company is expanding its reach beyond the US and Europe to the Middle East, South America and even Japan. No wonder Jindal is the winner in the Urban Visionary category of the BT-PwC India’s Best CEOs 2025 list. His company, Jindal Stainless, India’s top stainless-steel producer and among the top 10 globally in terms of output, reported a consolidated annual sales of Rs 39,081 crore in FY24. It had 16 manufacturing and processing facilities in India and abroad, including in Spain and Indonesia.
A Boston University graduate in Economics and Business Management, Jindal is upbeat about domestic sales on the back of increasing demand for stainless steel and rising per capita incomes as well as the government’s focus on capital investments, all of which bode well for the company.
Vipul Prasad, CEO and Founder of Sebi-registered portfolio manager Magadh Capital, says Jindal Stainless’ market dominance and scale, geographical diversification (market as well as manufacturing sites), rich product mix, and control over supply chain are ensuring that its return ratios are improving sustainably. “A strong balance sheet and prospects of strong volume expansion place the company well for the likely improvement in stainless steel market growth,” he says.
Jindal Stainless has revised its volume growth guidance to 10% for the current fiscal, nearly half of what it was expecting at the start of FY25, due to a subdued export market. But Jindal highlights the company is still delivering volume growth.
Brokerage Anand Rathi, in its update after the results of the third quarter of FY25, sounded confident about the prospects of the company.
“Due to robust domestic demand and improvement in the value-added product segment, it maintained its consolidated Ebitda guidance of [more than] Rs 20,000 per tonne. Despite imports increasing 5% quarter-on-quarter and export volumes dipping, the company was able to strengthen its presence across niche segments such as lifts and elevators, auto, white goods and metro,” it said in a note.
Jindal has a clear strategy of growing the company, which is a part of the supply chain of various international biggies like Gillette, several nuclear power projects, and car manufacturers. This became necessary as there has been a big shift in the stainless steel landscape. Until the 1990s, almost 80% of stainless steel was used for making utensils. Now, it's only 30-35%; the rest goes to industries such as chemical, ethanol, sugar and infrastructure (for instance, railways).
Stainless steel consumption in India is growing around 11% per annum, faster than any other metal. “Our company also wants to grow at the same pace,” says Jindal.
Bullish about growth, Jindal Stainless announced a three-pronged investment strategy involving Rs 5,400 crore to boost capacity (at present three million tonnes per annum or MTPA) in May 2024. This included a 49% partnership in a joint venture for a 1.2 MTPA stainless steel melt shop in Indonesia, expansion of downstream capacity in Jajpur, Odisha, and acquisition of 54% equity stake in Chromeni Steels in Mundra, Gujarat. This is expected to help ramp up production capacity to 4.2 million tonnes of annual melt capacity by FY27 in its quest to “achieve global leadership in stainless steel”.
Prasad of Magadh Capital says expanding capacities in a cost-effective manner can help the company in industry consolidation. “As the market leader in a steadily growing commodity, it makes sense to enhance entry barriers for potential entrants and curb competitive positioning of existing players,” he says.
Over the years, Jindal Stainless has put all the building blocks in place in terms of capacity, quality and research and development. The next step is creating more awareness about the usage of steel.
“What is still missing in the country is awareness about stainless steel. This material is inherently corrosion resistant, sustainable and follows a circular economy. Our job as the industry leader is to create more awareness about stainless steel, and that is one of the activities that we are now pursuing,” says Jindal.
Through the Jindal Stainless Academy, the company is using a two-pronged strategy—one, to create more awareness about the benefits of stainless steel among students of engineering, architecture, and railway colleges; and second, to start industrial and fabricator training programmes.
“We have gone for a big programme of training fabricators, which has been running for close to three years now, and we’ve trained almost 35,000 fabricators this year,” Jindal says. He plans to increase that almost threefold.
Another big bet is in renewable capacity. This is partly because of the carbon border adjustment mechanism or CBAM regulation of the European Union. Jindal says it is also a key sustainability initiative to reduce the carbon footprint. “Being a global citizen, we would like to keep our country and our world as clean and green as possible,” he says.
Jindal says following the announcement of CBAM, the company decided to spend about Rs 700 crore to Rs 800 crore to increase its renewable capacity. “We would like to export at least 30% of our output. Europe is a focus market for us,” he says. Now any expansion that the company does will be backed by renewable energy.
But it is not all smooth sailing. One of the challenges is the abundance of unorganised, subsidised, and substandard imports. A lot of the stainless steel being imported is in the wrong grade. This ends up giving stainless steel a bad name, Jindal points out.
Jindal Stainless is waiting to see how US tariffs on steel and aluminium imports plays out. Though it could lead to dumping in India, he points out that the 25% duty was announced by US President Donald Trump in his first term for Indian steel, stainless steel, and aluminium. Any such across-the-board levy would actually level the playing field for India.
A fitness enthusiast and a keen reader of non-fiction, preferably business and management books, Jindal was last October appointed as the President of the Indian Chamber of Commerce.
Clearly, just like the stainless steel his company produces, Jindal is working to make the company inherently strong and timeless.
@surabhi_prasad
