Pula Steel buyer budgets P20m for upgrades

Vision Ridge, a unit of India’s Yashomann Industries, recently sealed a P16 million deal to takeover Pula Steel, a liquidated Selebi-Phikwe plant that was using scrap metal to produce an intermediary product known as steel billets. The new buyer intends to produce final steel products for the first time in the country’s history by using scrap iron, sourced locally and externally, as well as iron ore sourced from Vision Ridge’s operational Ikongwe mine near Shoshong.

This week, Chetan Patil, director of Vision Ridge, told BusinessWeek that in the next few months a technical team from India and citizen engineers would work on modifications to the existing Pula Steel plant to enable the restart of production.