Hundreds of jobs have been saved at steel firm Caparo Industries owned by noted NRI industrialist Lord Swraj Paul after a UK-based Indian-origin family acquired one of its units. The Gupta family, which owns metals company Liberty House Group, acquired Caparo Tubular Solutions, a core division of Caparo Industries plc.
In October, Lord Paul’s Caparo announced around 452 jobs may have to go across the country, including 300 in the West Midlands, after it entered into administration. A total of 76 jobs in the West Midlands and south of England were saved last week when PwC confirmed Caparo Testing Technologies had been sold. The announcement on Saturday brings the total number of jobs saved at the company to 409.
Robert Moran, partner at PwC, said: “The sale of Caparo Tubular Solutions is a major boost for the Midlands economy, the employees of Caparo and more widely for the UK steel industry. This deal preserves all 333 jobs at Caparo Tubular Solutions, which manufactures, distributes and supplies advanced tube components and parts for the automotive and aerospace industries in the West Midlands and South Wales”.
The Gupta family concluded talks with administrators PwC and said that Liberty sees the multi-product Caparo tube businesses, headquartered at Oldbury in the West Midlands region of England, as a complement to its own hot rolled coil production, centred in Newport, South Wales. “There are many natural synergies between our hot rolled coil production business and Caparo’s design, manufacture and distribution of steel tube and various specialist engineering products,” said Sanjeev Gupta, chief executive of Liberty.
“They are established customers for our product and we have, in fact, looked at them in the past about the possibility of integrating the two businesses to create a robust new model for the UK steel sector.”