Irrespective of the official hype -hoopla, and glitzy corporate brochures and fancy web-site, the real story of Lloyds group is well known in the steel industry. This is known as Mama(RNAgarwal) Bhanja (Mukesh Gupta) group.
Firstly, this Lloyds group has got nothing to do with the internationally well known insurance giant of Lloyds.
Secondly, they have nothing to do with another famous Lloyds group of Punjs which includes Fedders Lloyd, Lloyd Insulations, Punj-Lloyd etc.
Guptas have been Bombay based steel traders. Mukesh Gupta supposedly a friend of Ambanis, started a steel fabrication unit, mainly taking mechanical fabrication and erection jobs for Reliance in early 80's. There was plenty of money to be made.
Mid 80's Steel Ministry suddenly decided to create sheet galvanising capacity in private sector (hitherto banned ) supposedly to take care of Bokaro CRM commissioning, and the extra capacity. Guptas
managed to corner the galvanising line licence issued to SICOM,(thanks to the suddeen change in Maharahtra Govt) and floated a joint venture unit SIPTA coated steel (SIcom + guPTA= SIPTA)and set up a good galvanising line (80,000tpa ) with CMI Belgium collaboration at Nanded, though the officially licenced capacity was 35000tpa. Galvanised steel sheets were in short supply, there was high premium on the product, SIPTA did produce good quality sheets, and made tons of money. Flush with money, they decided to diversify and went into anything and everything...NBFC-Lloyd Finance, Real estate-Lloyd realty, and wanted to set up a upstream steel plant at Wardha to produce HR coils.A plant incorporating a second hand steckel mill was set up which was tom-tommed as state of the art steel plant. Those were the hey days of steel industry, investors qued up to put their money.
One fine day SIPTA was sold out to Jains.
Then came the folding time for NBFC's, downfall of real estate business, recession in steel industry as well as overcapacity.
The artificially built empire and all the hype have no takers today.
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