The Performance of Indian Iron and Steel Industry and Competitiveness of the Firms

The paper examines the performance of Indian iron and steel industry in the pre and post-liberalisation periods in terms of primary indicators such as production, consumption and foreign trade. It also studies growth in capacity utilisation, prices and employment. It is deduced that the industry has grown manifold in all the aspects, especially after the liberalisation of the economy except employment, which shows a substantial fall during post-liberalisation when competition among the Indian manufacturing firms has increased. Therefore, that leads us to investigate the competitiveness of the sample firms in the industry through composite competitiveness indices. On the basis of overall competitiveness, as well as financial and non-financial aspects of competitiveness, the industry is mostly dominated by Tata Steel Ltd., even though SAIL has a greater market share and proves to be superior with respect to non-financial indicators.