Management Speaks

Q How did Jindal Stainless perform amid the global volatility of FY26?

FY26 was a year in which discipline outweighed disruption. Global manufacturing faced shipping delays, geopolitical volatility, trade distortions, and cost pressures, even as India held on to strong industrial momentum. Imports from China and Vietnam, often routed through ASEAN countries, kept domestic pricing under pressure, while developments in West Asia held fuel, energy, and logistics costs elevated. We focused on what we could control: sharper supply chain planning, tighter input-cost management, continued engagement on trade remedies, and agile, customer-focused execution.

That discipline shows in the numbers. Consolidated net revenue stood at INR 42,955 crore, EBITDA grew 19.2% Y-o-Y to INR 5,560 crore, PAT rose 27.4% Y-o-Y to INR 3,185 crore, and finished goods sales volume rose 8.1% to ~2.57 MTPA, a new benchmark for Jindal Stainless. We also strengthened our presence in export markets such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Germany. FY26 proved our platform can deliver growth even when the external environment does not cooperate.

Q How do the landmark investments announced during the year strengthen JSL’s long-term growth?

Our FY26 investments answer one question: how do we build a stainless steel platform that is more integrated, more self-reliant, and higher up the value curve? PT Glory Metal Indonesia, our 1.2 MTPA Melt Shop joint venture, was commissioned ahead of schedule, lifting global melting capacity to 4.2 MTPA, while PT Cosan Metal Industry secures cost-competitive nickel and reduces our exposure to volatile commodity markets. In India, the stabilisation of our long products plant in Ghaziabad, our pipes, tubes and special finishes plant in Kharagpur, and cold rolling mill in Mundra has enabled these facilities to been integrated across the manufacturing ecosystem, positioning us to capture higher-value demand.

We are deepening this value creation downstream too. Our INR 900 crore investment across Hisar and Kharagpur, along with new hot rolled annealing, pickling, and cold rolling facilities at Jajpur, will lift cold rolling capacity from 2.05 MTPA to 2.67 MTPA by FY28, supporting a higher-value mix for automotive, appliances, food processing, and industrial applications. Our proposed Maharashtra facility, a phased greenfield coastal plant with an eventual 4 MTPA capacity, will improve logistics efficiency, support import substitution, and serve high-growth strategic sectors.

None of this comes at the cost of discipline. With net debt at INR 3,040 crore, net debt-to-equity at 0.15x, and net debt-to-EBITDA at 0.55x, we enter FY27 with the balance sheet strength to fund our INR 2,600 crore capex programme while continuing to uphold the shareholder interest.

Q How is Jindal Stainless strengthening its market position and customer relationships?

Customer centricity guides how we build the stainless steel ecosystem. The material is already woven into everyday life, from homes and infrastructure to mobility, though per capita consumption still has room to grow towards the global average as its benefits become more visible to end-consumers. Closing that awareness gap and making it easier to do business with us are two sides of the same opportunity, and FY26 showed strong progress on both.

We appointed Ranveer Singh as our first-ever brand ambassador and launched our first brand campaign, ‘Jindal Saathi Seal Hai, Toh Asli Stainless Steel Hai’, spotlighting pipes and tubes and the Jindal Saathi Seal as a mark of authenticity. With our Sunrisers Hyderabad partnership, this is accelerating our shift from a predominantly B2B business to a stronger B2B2C model.

On ease of doing business, our Customer 360 dashboard gives a real-time, single-window view of orders, payments, and complaints, including GPS-enabled tracking, while Stainless Mart, our B2B e-commerce platform, enables online ordering, and instant access to statements and Material Test Certificates.

Channel trust is equally central. Our Jindal Saathi ecosystem distinguishes genuine JSL products from counterfeits and builds a trusted retailer and fabricator network, now extended into kitchenware, sinks, and water tanks. Our JSL Saathi Pragati loyalty programme, one of the largest in the segment, enables retailers and fabricators to verify products through QR code while earning rewards. The programme has grown to over 11,000 retailers and 75,000 fabricators, a clear signal that brand, trust, and ease of doing business are turning India’s potential into lasting demand.

Q What role are innovation and R&D playing in making JSL future-ready?

Innovation is how we convert scale into strategic advantage. We have formalised a multi-year R&D roadmap across four domains: Extractive and Process Science, High-Strength and Structural Grades, Specialty Alloys and New Products, and Breakthrough Research through X-Labs, structured to move us from product development to application-led solutions for India’s most demanding sectors.

We commercialised new products engineered for specific needs, including SM-650 super martensitic steel, 5% silicon stainless steel, Super Duplex UNS S32750, 9Cr1Mo, 430HF 2.0, and 410L SS500 rebar. We continued to serve highly customised orders for the strategic sector: our first commercial aerospace order for India’s Small Satellite Launch Vehicle programme, High Nitrogen Steel plates for defence, and Super Duplex Steel for naval and submarine use. Closer to civilian infrastructure, innovations like specialised salt containers for the railways, salt tippers, and Bengaluru metro components show the same R&D engine solving problems at scale.

Partnerships with IITs, CSIR-IMMT, and BITS Pilani, backed by Stage-Gate and Technology Readiness Level reviews and a dedicated R&D PMO, keep this pipeline disciplined. R&D at Jindal Stainless is not a research exercise apart from the business; it is how we win in aerospace, defence, infrastructure, and specialty applications, sector by sector.

Q How is digitalisation strengthening JSL’s operational excellence and customer experience?

Digitalisation scales our customer-first, executionfirst mindset across operations. Under Smart Factory 4.0, AI, predictive analytics, industrial IoT, and realtime dashboards are lifting equipment utilisation, and strengthening planning and customer responsiveness. Our industry-first supply chain digitalisation initiative at Hisar automates production from casting to finishing through AI-driven planning, targeting shortening of lead time by ~15%, lowering inventory costs by ~10%, and improving capacity utilisation by ~5%.

Total Process Quality Control (TPQC) uses predictive modelling to strengthen process discipline and deliver prime-quality products right the first time—a metric I consider most important in ensuring customer delight. FY26 also marked a step-change in AI capability: we established an AI Centre of Excellence, backed by an enterprise data platform integrating SAP, manufacturing systems, plant sensors, and planning tools, with over 50 use cases identified across procurement, sales, logistics, R&D, and operations. SAP expansion, ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification, and Zero Trust Architecture are strengthening cybersecurity and data integrity as we scale.

Digitalisation is not parallel to our ecosystem-building agenda; it is what makes that agenda deliverable, from the plant floor to the customer’s dashboard.

Q How are sustainability, people capability, and stakeholder engagement translating into long-term value?

In FY26, JSL scored 78 on the DJSI Corporate Sustainability Assessment, well above the global stainless steel industry average. That number is not the point on its own; it reflects a wider pattern: how we treat the material, the communities around us, and our own people all move together.

It starts with the material itself. Stainless steel is durable, corrosion-resistant, and fully recyclable, qualities that make resource efficiency and circularity possible by design, not by effort. But how we make it matters just as much as what it can do, which is why decarbonising our own production has been a priority in FY26. We partcommissioned our 315.6 MW solar-wind hybrid project with Oyster Renewable Energy, our largest renewable investment to date, which is expected to abate roughly 6.5 lakh metric tonnes of CO2e a year once fully operational. Renewable power constitutes of ~47% of the total imported power at Hisar and Jajpur.

A responsible operation, not just a responsible material, earns something less tangible but equally valuable: the trust of the communities it operates in. Our CSR programmes, including Stainless Swachhata Abhiyaan, Asmita, Sakhyam, and Niramaya, reached over 1.19 lakh people across healthcare, livelihoods, education, sanitation, and women’s empowerment in FY26, work that keeps our license to grow intact where we operate.

That same commitment extends to the people who work with stainless steel every day, not only within our own operations. The Stainless Academy is a community initiative built to strengthen the entire stainless steel workforce ecosystem, training fabricators who go on to work across the industry. In FY26, the Academy grew from 181 to 616 training programmes, trained nearly 36,000 fabricators, and crossed 82,000 in cumulative participation, work that helps build a more skilled stainless steel industry for everyone.

Inside our own operations, that same investment in people is what turns strategy into execution. FY26 marked a step change: we launched ASTRA, Academy for Stainless Steel Technology, Reskilling, and Advancement, to deepen technical capability across operations, maintenance, automation, and metallurgy, backed by IITs, NITs, and leading OEMs. Step-Up and Parivartan build our leadership pipeline, while we sponsor employees pursuing B.Tech, M.Tech, and MBA degrees at premier institutes to deepen expertise at every level. The payoff: an eNPS score of 64% in FY26, top quartile among organisations surveyed.

We measure our progress not only in what Jindal Stainless has built, but in what the stainless steel industry, as a whole, has become stronger for. That is the responsibility leadership carries, and the one we intend to keep.