Six years ago, Sanjeev Gupta stepped in where many brave business people have tried and failed. His mission? To make steel manufacturing in the UK profitable once again. And he is succeeding.
In this podcast, he talks to Nick Peters about how even his closest executives thought he was “obsessed” with making his first investment in the shut-down steel plant at Newport work. Despite “burning money”, he held his nerve and it is now in profit.
He describes his plans for making steel profitable in the UK through recycling the hundreds of millions of tons of scrap steel in the UK, rather than making it from expensive imported raw materials. He has since acquired a number of steel mills, as well as vowing to make alloy wheels for the car industry onsite at his aluminium smelting plant in Lochaber, Scotland.
And he discusses his commitment to educating the next generation of manufacturers, to repair the manufacturing spirit in the UK, which he says was “broken” by the de-industrialisation of heavy industry in the 70s and 80s.
Thanks to this formidable array of achievements, Sanjeev Gupta was made an ‘Exemplar’ in The Manufacturer Top 100 2018. You can download the report here.
