Tata Steel’s sales dropped 14.6 per cent in the March quarter in India as steel offtake tanked because of the lockdown in the last week of March. Europe, surprisingly, showed more resilience with sales going down a moderate 7.7 per cent against the year-ago number.

Compared with a 4.72-million-tonne sales volume achieved in the fourth quarter of 2018-19, Tata Steel managed to sell 4.03mt in the reporting quarter. The fall was 16.9 per cent when compared with the third quarter’s 4.85mt. The company attributed the drop to the pandemic.

“The lockdown has led to logistic issues and lower demand, driven by the shutdown of customer operations in automotive, construction and other segments since the last few days of March 2020,” the company said.

Despite the Covid-19 crisis, Tata Steel achieved its highest ever yearly sale at 16.97mt in 2019-20 in India compared with 16.26 mt a year ago.

In Europe, sales slipped from 2.57mt in 2018-19 to 2.37 million tonnes in the March quarter of 2019-20 as countries took different approaches in containment measures.

Analysts spot more challenges in the future. While maintaining a buy on the stock, Edelweiss Research said: “We see performance worsening in the first half of 2020-21 led by a demand dip in domestic market, lower exports realisation (down 25 per cent from 2019-20) and sustained weakness in domestic prices owing to destocking. We expect TSE (Tata Steel Europe) to make a loss at the operating level in 2020-21. We expect recovery only by Q4 of 2020-21.”