Essar Steel New Marketing Strategy

Essar Steel, a Ruia group company, performed well in 1997-98. While net sales rose by 36.8 per cent over the previous year, the company's net profit soared by 156.8 per cent. Operating profit improved by 27.6 per cent. Despite a huge non-operating profit (mainly on account of exchange variation) and 14.4 per cent increase in interest charges, the company managed to post a higher bottomline. While earnings per share rose from Re 0.3 to Re 0.8, the company prudently decided to skip dividend for the year. Book value