Tata wants more profit from Corus UK - FT

By Staff
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LONDON, Feb 4 (Reuters) Tata Steel Chairman Ratan Tata wants to make the UK operations of Anglo-Dutch group Corus more profitable and cannot rule out job cuts, he told the Financial Times in an interview.

Tata's victory over Brazil's CSN last week in a dramatic auction for Corus created the world's fifth-biggest steel maker.

Tata said his group's winning offer of 6.2 billion pounds (.2 billion), or 608 pence a share, for Corus had been ''very close'' to its top price.

''Our plan would be to try to make the UK operations more profitable,'' Tata told the paper's weekend edition.

His company has so far done only ''paper'' due diligence on Corus and has yet to examine its plants in detail, he said.

For this reason he could give no guarantee on job cuts.

''I wouldn't even attempt to do so because it would be wrong of me to give those assurances or to deny that that was so,'' he said.

''But I would say that we're not a company that would first look at jobs.'' The Financial Times said that to make the deal work, Tata would have to improve considerably the efficiency of Corus, whose margins at about 7 percent were less than a quarter of those of Tata Steel.

REUTERS PV RN1400

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