The impact of the on-going shutdown will be felt across industries and SAIL has already braced for lower capacity utilization during this period.

Anil Kumar Chaudhary, chairman of Steel Authority of India said, “From the mid of February, we started facing the heat of this Covid-19. It was mainly from the market point of view that we had the trouble. From the mid of February suddenly there was some shortage of orders and as we entered March it became more prominent and by March 20th these orders almost dried and buyers decided to wait for some more time. So after the lockdown we have been forced to bring down our capacity utilisation close to 50 percent.”

“Production has come down by almost 50 percent and even with 50 percent production we find that there has been substantial increase in the inventories. This month itself, we expect to increase the inventories by around 300 thousand tonnes that is 3 lakh tonnes,” he said in an interaction with CNBC-TV18.

On the cash flow position he said, “As far as cash flow is concerned we continue to be comfortable and we have paid all our interest and the installments in time. We did not even wait for the moratorium period to come-in because we had already planned for all the repayments in advance. As far as April and May is concerned, the burden of the fixed expenses will be there."

"However, going forward when we do not get any cash flow and we have to meet our fixed expenses, that will be by way of additional borrowings from the banking system for which we have already alerted our banks that given the present position we may be requiring some more working capital. I am confident that the banks will stand by us,” he further added.

While giving sense on debt situation he said, “The debt has gone up because this month we were expecting good collections which unfortunately did not happen. At the same time certain payments were lined up, those were in the form of interest payment. We had also lined up some raw materials, particularly coking coal -- those payments we have met as per the schedule. Currently, we have reached a debt at around Rs 50,000 crore and as we go forward the debt will definitely go up.”

“One other thing has happened is that our debtors -- our receivables, we have not been able to get payments from them and the debtor’s level have gone up to as high as Rs 7,000 crore, which earlier used to be in the range of Rs 2,500 to Rs 3,000 crore,” he said.

“I am confident that as the new financial year starts and the government departments start getting their allocation, they will be able to pay us substantial amount of debtors and also as the economic activity picks up after the lockdown period, we will be able to realise our debtors from the private parties also.”