Besides graduating from iron ore trading to mining and setting up an integrated steel and pellet plant, MSPL has also diversified into industrial gases, wind energy and shipping When the Baldota brothers corporatised their 10-year-old iron trading business as Mineral Sales Pvt Ltd in 1962, they had only one customer: the public sector Minerals and Metals Trading Corporation (mmtc), through which all exports from India were channelised. Over the years, the company - which was deemed public a decade ago and formally renamed mspl Ltd -has grown into the largest private sector iron ore mining and exporting company in Karnataka's Bellary-Hos-pet sector, winning the Chemicals and Allied Products Export Promotion Council (capexil) award every year since 1999. And the Baldota group, with interests in iron ore mining, industrial gases, wind power and shipping, has a turnover of Rs4,000 crore; its sights are set on entering the RslO,000-crore league by 2011-12 with its upcoming steel plant. "Today, we talk in terms of millions of tonnes," says group chairman and managing director Narendra Kumar A. Baldota. "The quantity was insignificant in those days!" The growth story began in 1996 when mspl got its first export licence for 100,000 tonnes of iron ore, on two conditions: that it did not sell them in lump form, and not to Japan, which was the world's biggest market. "For 35 years, we employed 2,000 people to manually break the ore into big lumps for mmtc," says executive director Shrenik N. Baldota, the cmd's younger son. "China was a new market; we started exploring it to sell the 1.5 million tonnes (mt) of stock we had accumulated till then." The first private sector company to get a licence for export of high-grade iron ore from India, mspl has been instrumental in identifying and developing the market for Fines in China. "We had to run after the government of India for permission to export all the stock we had," says Narendra Baldota. "It was a challenge. I went to China and saw steel plants at every corner. And when I introduced myself, I got a very good response -because our quality has always been good and consistent." India now supplies 75 mt of Fines out of China's total imports of 80 mt. Today, China is the world's biggest consumer of iron ore, importing 100 mt from India alone to feed its mills that roll out 500 mt of steel annually. Most of this goes to feed the smaller steel mills. "We'll double our share of this to 10 mt in the next couple of years, with the addition of another mine to the five we have in this area, plus one in Jharkhand," says Shrenik Baldota. At mspl's long-time customer in China, Sinosteel Trading Company, resources department manager Fang Yangbian says his company chose mspl because it is "a reliable and professional iron ore shipper with iron ore mine operations and stable cargo quality". Both mspl and Sinosteel are big and reliable companies in the business, he points out. "We got to know each other through various channels, like iron ore conferences, seminars, technical exchanges and mine site visits," Yangbian says. "We have had mutually beneficial business over the past more than six years. The quantity of iron ore traded between us per annum is over one million tonnes, with iron content ranging from 61 per cent to 65 per cent." So, how has the recent global economic turmoil affected mspl? "Last year has been mixed for us," says Rahul Kumar Baldota, Shrenik's elder brother and fellow executive director, who is also president of the Federation of Indian Mineral Industries (fimi). "The first six months of 2008-09 were robust, whereas the next six forgettable." Overall, he admits, it's been "more negative than positive", mspl's exports fell from Rs2,500-plus crore in 2007-08 to Rsl,739 crore last year, a fall of about 30 per cent. Describing the recent merger of the Australian iron ore businesses of global mining major Rio Tinto and bhp Billiton as "good news for us", he says, "The tie-up will push up Chinese spot prices and narrow the gap with long-term prices for iron ore. With this deal, the bargaining power of suppliers will be better, as there will now only be two major suppliers." Increasing efficiency mspl, which its cmd says has championed the cause of systematic and scientific development of mines and deployment of the best technology from across the world, got its iso 9001:2000 and iso 9002:1994 certification in 1997. "We were the first to get iso 9000 in the mineral sector in India," Narendra Baldota points out. It is also certified for oshas: 18000:1999, for its occupational health and safety management system. "We were the first to introduce hydraulic drills," says K. Madhusud-hana, general manager, mines, at the company's Vyasanakere Iron Ore Mines (viom). "These have increased efficiency by five to six times." In 1991, viom built its own gravity-based downhill conveyor system to carry ore from the mines to its fleet of trucks at road level. This saves diesel costs as well as emissions from the trucks labouring 2.5 km up the steep inclines, Madhusudhana explains. Two years ago, this was replaced by a new Rs45-crore system, erected by the Pune-based Sandvik Asia, which incorporates the drilling and crushing equipment with a sin