Episode 3: David Stickler, Hybar

This is the Green Steel Challenge. Hi, I'm Astrid Korf and this is the Green Steel Challenge. My father, Willy Korf, revolutionized the steel industry in the late 60s with his mini-mills and his new energy-saving technologies. My mission today is to help make steel production greener. But what is green steel? How can we make it? And how can we speed up the progress? In this podcast, we will challenge the steel industry to get specific about how to get to zero carbon steel. We will meet global industry leaders to push the conversation and the innovation forward. Joining me on this journey are two of the keenest observers in the space, Dr. Mike Waltz and James Moss. Our special guest today is joining us from Osceola, Arkansas, in the US, David Stikler, CEO of Hyper. Welcome, David. Let me say again how honored I am to be part of your podcast series. I greatly appreciate it and will certainly be doing my best to share information to your listeners. Welcome, Dave. You're always up to something interesting in this industry. What's the latest version of the Dave Stikler project? Well, thanks, thanks for allowing me to talk about the exciting project called High Bar Steel. Okay. So, High Bar Steel is a newly formed company. We were able to successfully raise $700 million to build what we believe will be the most environmentally sustainable, most energy efficient scrap metal recycling steel rebar production facility, not only in the United States, not only in North America, but the world. How are you achieving that technically rather than financially? From a technical perspective, we're building on the great success that we had a few years ago informing another company in raising capital and building a green field site, Big River Steel. And all of the environmental sustainability lessons that we learned at Big River Steel were taking those lessons and furthering them at High Bar. That includes the use of a DC furnace to produce rebar, where most rebar in the world, including 100% of the rebar in North America is produced using an AC furnace. DC furnaces cost a little bit more money. They're a little bit more challenging to operate. But the fact of the matter is, with a DC furnace, you have one carbon electrode versus three carbon electrodes in an AC furnace. And obviously, as you're producing steel and consuming your electrodes, the fewer carbon electrodes you have, the better off you're going to be from a carbon emissions perspective. So that's point one. We spent more money. It's tougher to operate, but in the end, it'll allow us to have fewer carbon emissions than any of our competitors in North America. We all use AC furnaces. We also have spent a significant sum of money on our fume evacuation system. Fume evacuations, there's some colloquial terms, a bag house, an elephant house. But basically, it's a huge vacuum that sits on top of our melt shop. And as we're charging the furnace, any of the fumes, obviously, they'll raise up to the ceiling area. And in our bag house, we'll collect those fumes. We'll then go through a very, very rigorous screening method, similar to air purifiers in an airplane, where they take all the particles out to get captured in the filters. That's what we do with high bars steel production process. That's what we did at Big River Steel. And quite frankly, that's what I've been doing for almost 25 years of my career as we've put in these highly efficient electric arc furnace operations, rather than the more traditional integrated steel operations. Where are you drawing your power from? Oh, great question. We will be the only steel producer in North America that has a solar facility connected directly behind the meter. So a lot of times you'll see steel companies announce, hey, look how green we are, we've invested in a solar facility. Yet the solar facility could be several hundred miles away from where they're producing steel. Now, that's a good thing that the steel company is making an investment in a solar facility. I don't want to criticize people for doing that. But to claim that just because you've invested in a solar facility, you're now producing green steel, that's nonsense. At high bar, our solar facility will be directly connected, as I mentioned, into our operations. So when the sun is shining, I'm going to be able to show our customers the sun, my solar panels, the transmission line from the solar panels directly into my furnace, I'll be able to operate with 100% renewable energy when the sun is shining. I'm also putting in battery storage. So in the evening hours, as the sun is starting to set, I'll be able to supplement my grid power with renewable stored batteries. So what happens typically, when you put renewable power onto a grid system, the electrons get all mixed up with electrons that were produced by natural gas, coal, nuclear, biomass. You don't know where the electrons are coming from. At high bar, I'm going to know precisely where the electrons are coming from when the sun is shining or when I'm using my batteries. In the space of a week or a month, say, Dave, what fraction of that time do you think will be renewable solar energy? What fraction? Sure, sure. And I can't give you a week by week because during the seasonality, during the winter, we have fewer sunlight. But during the summer months, when we have longer daylight hours, I'll be 60% to 65% renewable. Now, that takes into effect the evening and night hours and some days where it's partially cloudy. But we expect that on certain weeks of the year, we'll be 60% to 65%. That solar field is exclusively for your use? Yes, it's directly our solar field. We're investing the money on a solar field ourselves, yes. I believe there was an earlier rebar project that you were involved with that didn't come off. How do you select your projects and what was it about this particular project that attracted you to it? I've long looked at the rebar space and in the United States, there's two companies that control 70% of the market, two very good companies, one of which is a company called Newcore Corporation and another one is a company called Commercial Metals, CMC. Both two companies, they really have an oligopoly and in addition to all the, let's say, less than fully competitive events that take place when you have an oligopoly, they also are competing every day with their customers. The rebar market in North America, the main customers are the fabricators. People take rebar and bend it and form the cages before you put the concrete in, et cetera. Well, those two companies, they also fabricate close to 30% of the rebar in North America. So at high bar, I'm going to be highly efficient, highly environmentally sustainable, and I'm not going to compete with my customers. I also have the fact that in the United States and Canada, the federal government has made determinate or the federal governments have made determinations to support infrastructure buildout, new roads, new bridges, new tunnels, new airports, new port facilities, and that funding is going to last 10 plus years. So I'll be, for the first time in my career, building a steel mill that is going to be selling into what I think will be a growing market. Typically what I've done is produce flat-walled mills where in North America, the consumption has generally been flat over the last 25 years. Maybe one year you get a few extra tons here or there, but it's all been a game of takeaway, where if you put in the best of technology from an efficiency, labor productivity, environmental sustainability, the high man on the totem pole in terms of cost is going to go out of business, and that's what I've seen. When I first started this 25 years ago, putting these greenfield steel mill projects together, steelmaking was 80% raw and 20% grains. You needed to have big, burly, tough men and women out there working in the mill itself. Today at a company like High Bar, we're 90% grains, 10% raw. 25 years ago, 70% of the steel in North America was produced by the integrated steel makers, using iron ore and the coaking coal. Today, in the United States, the steelmaking has flip-flopped completely, where today 70% is produced by the electric arc furnace producers. A lot of those have been mills that my group has been involved in, either building or expanding, and only 30% is by integrated. If we have a conversation in another three or four years, my guess is it will be somewhere between 15 and 18% of the steel in North America will be integrated. The rest will be EAS. Compared to some of your other projects, you've successfully raised equity and debt to finance the facility. How easy was this project to get people interested in? Yeah. So what I would tell you, it's never easy raising money for a new startup company greenfield project, but we've done it time and time and time again, and we do have a core group of investors that tends to follow us around. At High Bar, we have an equity group that is led by TPG Capital, and it's through their Rise Climate Fund. It's a $18 billion fund within a total portfolio of $135 billion, and their investment objective is to identify growth-oriented, environmentally focused companies. And High Bar fit very, very nicely in there. One of the partners at TPG has been investing in these scrap metal recycling steel production facilities with me for really 25 years. The first one we did was when we formed a company called Steel Dynamics almost 25 years ago. That partner that I referenced was one of the investors, my group was one of the investors. The bank on that project was a bank out of Germany called KFW. KFW has financed probably 70% of my projects over the years. And the technology provider, going way back all the way to Steel Dynamics, it was a company called SMS. Also out of Germany, they're High Bar's technology provider. So not easy, but we have a track record. We've been highly, highly successful over two and a half decades, and evidence of that is the fact that many of these project participants tend to follow my group along as we do these projects. Now, what I also will tell you about the financing for High Bar, we were the first steel producer in the world to be able to issue what's called climate bonds. Those are third party verified bonds that are issued by a company that is designed to be in conformity with the Paris Agreement. We are the first steel producer in the world to be able to issue climate bonds. And I was just last week giving a speech in New York to the group of investors focused on sustainability, and the fact that we were able to break through and issue those climate bonds was really a showstopper for a lot of people, really made them wake up. No different than when we did Big River Steel a few years ago, we were the first steel producer in the world to be LEED certified, leadership and environmental and energy design. So at High Bar, right now, we're going through the process of also becoming LEED certified. So at High Bar, we'll not only have the climate bonds, but we'll be LEED certified. Do you or your investors, Dave, have a convenient definition of low carbon steel or green steel? Do you get hung up on these definitions, or is it just generally understood, you hope? I think there's a lot of what's called greenwashing in this industry, where people say, "Oh, look how sustainable I am," and many of them who make those claims are in fact not, okay? I go by pure facts. The last mill I did, our Scope One admissions were 15 times lower than the world average. The world average for every ton of steel that's produced is over two tons of carbon, all right? Now, that's a world average. There's some that are many, many times higher, all right? In fact, if you look at some calculations, they say it's 2.85 tons of carbon for every ton of steel produced, all right? And there's others like Big River and several of the other mills that I built here in the United States where we're 0.123, 0.15, 0.17, so very, very clean from a carbon admissions perspective versus the world average. And I define green steel as putting my numbers up on the board and having everyone go through the same calculation and seeing where their numbers line up, all right? I have the advantage because I keep building brand new mills and you're able to get the best technology and technology is evolving so fast. The next mill I build for High Bar, it'll be even cleaner than this one that I'm building right now because it'll be two years out and just like your iPhones, you know, every two or three years they get an improvement, same thing in the steelmaking industry. We've heard about a new facility in California where we're talking earlier about a new facility in Holland, in the Netherlands to produce wire rods, both essentially green field plants. There is something of we can't get there from here in many cases that some of these facilities actually will never be clean enough and you might as well start again, given the capital intensity required to clean them up. I'm not a believer at all that you can take an existing facility and put lipstick on the pig and have, you know, a beauty pageant contestant, you just can't, okay? The best way to get an energy efficient, environmentally sustainable is to start with a clean piece of paper. That's what I do, all right? I see all of these projects around the world, including in the UK, where the UK government is involved in saying to an integrated steelmaker, hey, we're going to partner with you. We're going to give you a lot of capital and we want you to, you know, put in an electric arc furnace in an existing operation. That doesn't work. The Canadian government did the same thing with the Algoma Steel. They took an old facility and put a new electric arc furnace in. It's like if you took a Jaguar car from the 1970s and put a new engine in, you'd still have a 1970 car. The brakes, the handling, the body, the safety, it's just, you can't do it, okay? And then I also have to tell you that I've been around the steel industry long enough that there's a lot of people that, all they do is talk about what projects they're going to do and they never do them. Because as you all recognize, raising capital for a new startup company is tough. In the plant builds, my five favorite words any time I do a project are ahead of schedule, under budget, okay? Those are my five favorite words. A lot of people, they have no idea. And we build these ourselves. We don't have a turnkey contractor, all right? Now, if you've never done it before, you lose your shirt. But we have subcontractors, certain construction groups that we work with time and time and time and time again, okay? And I also have to tell you gentlemen, I have a philosophy, crawl before you walk, walk before you run, run before you sprint. So I see projects in Europe where they're trying to build the most advanced technology in the North Pole doing five things that have never been done before all at the same time. They should take one of those projects, get it built, start generating cash flow, and then do the next one, then the one after that, then the one after that. Too many people, they get big, big eyes and say, well, I want to have the whole pie myself all at once. No, sometimes just take a little piece of the pie, then grow the pie a little bit bigger once you're generating cash. So we have a method that has served us, my firm, my investors, my banks, my employees very, very well. And it's to crawl before you walk, walk before you run, run before you sprint. A lot of the money being talked about in Europe is driven by hydrogen investments. Where does hydrogen feature in your planning? Yeah. So what we're going to do is at High Bar, we have space on our site. We want 1,300 acres of property, including 200 acres on the Mississippi River. So we have a chance to have one of the largest port facilities between the city of St. Louis and New Orleans. So I can ship my rebar by barge, by rail, by truck, and I can bring my raw materials in as well. But part of our 1,300-acre site, we're going to put in a hydrogen production facility. So we'll use that hydrogen. It's not going to-- we haven't decided exactly how much hydrogen we're going to produce. But I will use that hydrogen in some of my burners, in my furnace, all right, in some of my ladle-three heaters. And over time, once we find that that is a viable, workable solution, we'll expand our hydrogen production. So I'm not going to spend a gazillion dollars doing it. I'm going to put in a small facility that is expandable. And once it's proven out both technology-wise and just as important economically-wise, then we'll add more hydrogen. Will that be solar powered as well, Dave? Yes, absolutely. OK. It'll be solar powered plus the solar power that's stored in my batteries. There's some technology that indicates that it's probably easier to produce hydrogen using battery storage rather than directly off of the solar panels themselves. And so these are some of the things that we're investigating right now. So we're not making any claim that we're going to be a very, very large hydrogen producer. Our claim is we're going to spend a certain amount of money. We're going to produce some hydrogen and we're going to see how it works. And if it works, we'll keep expanding and building more hydrogen. When did you realize you'd have to become a battery expert, Dave? You know what? The technology is changing so fast. I don't know that anybody truly is a battery expert because there's various technologies, but I'll get into just a little bit of a detail for you, OK? So when you charge these electric arc furnaces, you have a tap-to-tap time, which is about 33 minutes. So during that 33 minutes, you're, let's say, full power on for a portion of that 33 minutes. And then for the next 27 minutes or so, you've idled the way down, OK? And so when I idled way down, hey, the sun's still shining and I'm generating power, I'm not hooked up to the grid. What am I going to do with that power? Well, that's a perfect time because basically it's free power then, right? I just put it right into the batteries. So that's what led to us expanding the high bar mindset to say, hey, rather than just having a direct fee from our solar facility directly into our plant without going to the grid, let's also take that excess time and fill it up, fill some batteries up. And that's what we're doing. Can you remember a time when green steel or net zero steel, decarbonized steel, was not part of the conversation, or do you remember when it first cropped up? I think it first popped up when a lot of people began greenwashing the steel industry and saying, oh, if we say we're sustainable, if we say we're green, that's going to benefit us. So let's call that 10, 15 years ago when people really started. When we did a project called Severcore, which was a flat rolled mill in the state of Mississippi, that's really where we first began looking at, you know, in a significant level, carbon emissions. And we spent a lot of money on a bag house down there, or elephant houses, as I mentioned earlier. So that's, for me, that's where it really started. But I also, I have to just laugh. There are some people in this world that run around and saying, hey, we're going to collect what's called a green premium for our steel. Our steel is going to be so green and so environmentally sustainable, people are going to pay us a 20, 30, 40% premium for our steel. No way. No way. Not happening. Okay. Now, I saw this first hand at one of my other projects, well, it was Big River where we were lead certified. If my steel was selling for 1200 bucks a ton, and it was produced in a lead certified facility, and one of my competitor's steels was selling for 1200 bucks a ton, and it was produced in a blast furnace with all kinds of carbon emissions and everything else. Everything else being equal, price, quality, service, delivery times. I'm going to get the order. So I call it a tiebreaker. Okay. I'm not a gambler, but if you go to a casino and you play Blackjack or 21, in the house always wins the tiebreaker. I don't know much, but casinos tend to be fairly profitable, so I'll take the tiebreaker. And that's what I see of green steel. The greener you are, the more chance you're going to have to get the tiebreaker. But not a 20, 30, 40% premium. Please do not believe that. That's not happening. And are your fabricator customers, are they hearing the green steel talk from their customers? Oh, yeah. So that's really interesting because it's almost like a pull through. So if you're building a new condominium complex, especially in certain regions of North America, the Pacific Northwest, for instance, you go out there and you can see signs on the condominium complexes, Canada's first zero carbon condo project. I don't know how they define that because there's really no definition yet. But the fabricators' customers are interested in sustainable projects, but they're not going to pay more for it, okay? So they're saying to the fabricators, "Hey, go get me some sustainable rebar so I can build this 60, 80-foot tower," and then they say, "Well, can we charge your premium for it?" The condominium developers are going to say, "No," because the customer is not going to pay 20%, 30%, 40% more for a condominium in a tower that's zero carbon versus one down the street that might be just as nice, but maybe not zero carbon. I mean, it all comes down to the consumer. And at the end of the day, I don't believe consumers are willing to pay more for a zero carbon condo. Maybe some people with high, high levels of discretionary income, it might make them sleep better at night. But at the end of the day, you better be able to produce environmentally sustainable steel as cost efficient as your competitors. And the way we do that at our companies is, at High Bar, we're going to produce 4,090 tons of steel a year per worker, all right? I have competitors who can't even get 1,000 tons of steel per year per worker. So in addition to spending a lot of money on environmental sustainability equipment, I spend a heck of a lot of money on automation. At one of my projects, I was over 5,000 tons of steel per year per worker. In my closest competitor, they were at 1,500 tons of steel per year per worker. That allows me to have the highest paid steel workers in the world. Two years ago on one of my projects, the average worker made over $200,000 a year plus benefits. And that's in a rural community of 5,000 people. We pay weekly production bonuses, there's no cap, no cap. So you get your base wage, and the more steel you produce, the more money you make. The highest weekly production bonus I had at that company was 287%. So you imagine you get your base wage, and then you get a 287% weekly production bonus. Now not every week, because for instance, if something breaks in the mill, and you have an unplanned downtime, you know what the bonus is during that unplanned downtime, zero. So the workers learn how to baby the mill. They run it as hard as they can, but they don't run it so hard that it breaks. It's like a Formula One race car. You take it right to the edge, you make sure you maintain it, but just don't go over the edge, because if you go over the edge in steel mill, zero bonus if something breaks. So what you've described, Dave, is obviously a very modern, highly efficient project that happens to be green, which is great. The situation in the U.S. lends itself to that. Is U.S. the future of global steel, or regional steel, wider than North America? The U.S. is a great place to make steel. We export out of this country 17 million tons of scrap, year in and year out. So people said to me, for 25 years that I've been doing this, they said, Dave, there's too much steelmaking capacity, and there's not enough scrap metal. Well, there is maybe too much steelmaking capacity, but a lot of it is the older, antiquated capacity. It was built 60, 70, 80 years ago. That capacity should not be around anymore, it should go away. And that's what we've helped do, is to modernize the North American steel industry, all right? They also said not enough scrap. I've never run out of scrap. Every ton of steel that's ever been produced in this world, unless it's at the bottom of the ocean, is available for a company like Kibar to buy and melt it and make new steel, okay? So the U.S. has plenty of scrap. The U.S. has very competitive electricity rates. It has a heck of a transportation system, and it has consistent demand for steel. So I've made a lot of money for my investors, my employees, and our company building these newly designed greenfield scrap metal recycling steel production facilities. I'm going to continue to do it. I've done it elsewhere in the world. Sometimes it's a little more challenging, all right? If you don't have a low-cost power source, if you don't have consistent demand, and you have questionable transportation options, may not be the best place to build a steel production facility. I mean, I know this doesn't apply specifically to the high-bar investment. Do you subscribe to the idea that we're likely to see a deintegrated iron industry producing direct reduced iron, separate from a steel industry, as is talked about here? People call themselves steel producers, yet historically they've owned iron ore mines, they've owned coal mines, they've owned fabrication facilities, building systems. They're anything but a steel producer. So anything that can divorce the steel making from feedstock making, I'm encouraging, okay? The multiple, the value multiple on a steel mill, if you do it correctly, should be much higher than the multiple on a DRI facility. Those multiples from a market value perspective should be more like a chemical plant, where if you're a go-go steel company, you should get a much higher multiple. So I'm encouraging that, but I still see a lot of people in the steel industry who operate steel mills. I'm going to build my own DRI facility, HBI facility, et cetera, okay? I also have to tell you, if you look across the landscape, other than in the Middle East, there is plenty of wreckage out there where people who have invested in DRI, HBI facilities and lost their tail, okay? What you're really going to see is this. The electric art furnace steel community, in for certain grades of steel, you have to get your residuals down to a lower level. So you're going to see more investments in the scrap sorting, okay? That's a lot cheaper than building a billion-dollar plus DRI facility or HBI facility, okay? So you're going to see that. You're also going to see the steel consumers say, "Hey, I don't really need a 0.8 copper level. I can get by with a 0.12 or 0.13 copper level." So instead of a 0.08, I can get by with a 0.12 or a 0.13. I saw that at Severcourt, we worked with one of the appliance manufacturers making dryers and they said, "Hey, we need this very, very clean steel for our dryer drums." We said, "Well, who told you that?" They said, "Well, that's just the way we've always done it." We said, "How about we show you you can use steel that maybe isn't quite, quite, quite the filet mignon, highest quality steel. You're going to save money because it'll cost you less and I'll be happy to sell you without having to put in all that premium-grade scrap. So you're going to see more of that as well. So I'd be awful careful about jumping on the bandwagon and say, "Look how much money we're going to make by putting in green DRI and green HBI." The operators in the melt shop would much prefer scrap metal than some of these virgin metallics. What the guys like is, the guys and gals, they like scrap metal and pig iron. Now, pig iron, the vast majority of pig iron historically has come from the Ukraine and Russia. You can get it from Brazil, you can get it from India, you can get it from South Africa, you can get it from certain other countries. What I think where investments do make sense is in greener pig iron rather than green DRI and green HBI. Now, it's still going to have a higher carbon emissions than a pure DRI or HBI would, but I think when you look at the investment capital returns, how the furnaces and how the baghouse is now can capture those emissions, that's probably more economically viable path than spending billion dollars plus to build a new HBI or DRI facility. We're going to give you a job, Dave, that you would hate. You might want to resign on day one, but you are the European Union Steel Commissioner. What would be the first thing you would do to get Europe from point A to point B? Get all the bureaucracy out of the way. You can't, you know, a European Steel Commissioner, he or she, unless she has the ability and the authority to make decisions and allow people, you know, direct them to do something, it'll take forever. But what I would do is I would step back and say, okay, how much steel do we really need to be produced in the EU? Is the EU the best place to produce steel? I'll give you the craziest example I've seen in a long time. Friends of mine at the Vostalpine in Austria, okay? They go in and they say, we're going to take one of these old steel facilities somewhere in the Swiss Alps and we're going to invest all this money to modernize it. And we're going to mine iron ore with Rio Tinto down in Brazil. We're going to ship it to Corpus Christi, Texas. Take HBI very efficiently, we're then going to take that HBI, put it on a ship, take it over to a port in Europe, then we're going to put it on river barges, barge it all the way up to our steel mill that's somewhere in the Swiss Alps, and boy, oh boy, are we going to have green steel, okay? That doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, okay? But what I do think that makes sense is, let's figure out to have the right number of steel-producing facilities that can meet the demands of the automotive industry in certain other industrial sectors where we know we're going to want to play. And let's focus our attention on doing what's been done well in the United States, which is putting in brand new electric arc furnace operations, making sure you're not overpaying for power, and making sure that you're not getting caught up in any union activity. You cannot run a highly efficient steel mill if you've got three times as many workers as your competitors, and sometimes these European Union commissions or government entities, I've seen it in the UK where you guys are. The unions get involved, and they hamstring the project from day one. I'm not anti-union. In fact, I've operated union facilities early in my career, but you've got to partner with the union, and rather than having 3,000 workers, you have 1,000 workers, and you make sure those 1,000 workers are highly, highly paid. What do you think the US steel industry is going to look like in about 10 years' time? I think in 5 years' time, you'll see no more than 18% of the steel produced by the integrated steel makers. I think you'll see some very, very healthy companies. Companies like Steel Dynamics, which is a company I help start, a company like Newcore, which is a fine competitor, a company like High Bar, Big River Steel, they'll be continuing to grow and dominating the steel space. I think you'll see a closer level of cooperation, as I mentioned earlier, between the customers and the steel producers, when a customer says, "Hey, I need the finest quality of steel." For certain applications, they do, but for many applications, it's just the lazy man's way. It's easier to run their operations, their stamping plants, their fabrication plants. At the end of the day, the customers and the steel producers have to come together, but I do think that the US will continue to lead the world in terms of percentage of carbon-efficient steel production. It's all right here. We've got the electrical grid, we've got plenty of space for solar panels, windmills, whatever you want, and the scrap again. I'm right on the Mississippi River. Every day, I look out my window, I see all the barges going down to export scrap over to Turkey or Spain or wherever there's been. I just tell the tugboat captains, "I flag them out." Pull over here and drop some of that scrap off of them. I mean, it works. That way, they don't have to go all the way to New Orleans. That's a very hopeful vision. We look forward to talking to you again in a couple of years when high bar is up and running. Well, it's actually, you don't even have to wait that long. It's 20 and a half months from now. I was just with our team earlier today and we were going over the project schedule. And again, my five favorite words, under budget, ahead of schedule. And that's where we're headed. It's not easy. It's hard work, but look forward to chatting and sharing with you the high bar story whenever you're interested. Thanks very much for your time, Dave. It's been a pleasure. Absolute pleasure. Yeah. Thank you very much and enjoy the rest of your day. Likewise. Thank you all for this very interesting discussion. I can't wait for our next episode, in which we will be joined from India by Mr. Sajjan Jindal, chairman and managing director of the JSW Group.