Sunday, April 16 2006 14:02 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Seoul: The world's fifth largest steel manufacturer hopes to make the adjustment after successful installation of its indigenously developed finex technlogy in its Pohang steel facility. The new technlogy could increase production efficiency from high alumina laced Indian iron ore.

"Indian iron ore, compared to Brazilian and Australian iron ore, has high alumina contents. In order to maximize efficiency, we have to swap iron ore having low alumina content from abroad. However, the finex technlogy which will be used in our Orissa project allows us to minimise amount of iron ore to be swapped," Posco Chief Executive Officer Ku-taekLee told a visiting media team from Orissa at his Daechi-dong office here recently.

"During our studies we found that the Indian steel companies are far behind in terms of efficiency. And the lack of efficiency came from high alumina content in iron ore," Lee said.

The swapping clause had triggered a controversy as the Orissa government, which allows only captive use of iron ore, had given permission to Posco-India to export 30 per cent of600 million tonne ore against equal amount of import.

Lee said, "We were initially thinking of using blast furnace technology. However, the finex technology installed at our Pohang facility has shown encouraging results to be replicated in Orissa," he said.