Coal news and updates

Parth Jindal, son of Sajjan Jindal, Chairman, JSW Group, has been appointed as Managing Director of JSW Cement.

He will be assisted by Anil Kumar Pillai as CEO.

He will take over as Managing Director of JSW Cement in July, said sources.

The company is building a 2.5-million-tonne cement grinding unit at Salboni in West Bengal.

Parth, 25, who was an Economic Analyst of JSW Steel, has shown keen interest in growing the cement business and was instrumental in convincing the group to invest ₹800 crore in the grinding unit at the site where the work on a 10-million tonne integrated steel plant with an investment of ₹35,000 crore was stopped due to delay in allocation of raw material linkages.

JSW had acquired about 4,000 acres for the steel plant in West Bengal, but is now constructing the cement grinding unit on 134 acres and a power plant of 300 MW with investment of ₹2,000 crore.

Apart from the new grinding unit, JSW Cement has units at Vijaynagar and Dolvi with a cumulative capacity of six million tonnes. The company plans to ramp up production capacity to 16 million tonnes.

JSW Cement is among the top five companies short-listed for acquiring 11 mt of cement capacity put on the block by Lafarge, which is selling assets in India due to its global merger with Holcim.

JSW Group has also shown interest to list the cement business after achieving economy of scale.

The JSW Group scion started training with JSW Steel when he returned after his undergrad at the age of 22.

He started off as an economist and later went to Japan on six months training with partner JFE.

Back home, Harvard educated Parth worked in the human resources, legal and marketing divisions, and was entrusted with chalking out a strategy to turnaround the loss-making pipe and plate mills in the US.

It did not take much time for Parth to convince the infrastructure focused company to diversify into funding internet and technology focused start-ups with a venture capital fund of ₹100 crore.

Parth, who has a penchant for sports, is also the chief executive of the group's sport company, which owns Bangalore Football Club and prepares athletes for Olympics.

A football freak, Parth is a district-level table tennis player and was instrumental in conducting special programmes to identify and groom sports talent in the country for international recognition.

Source: Business Line