Ferrous and non-ferrous run as parallel branches inside shared stages, because the contrast is the point. India is self-sufficient in iron ore and imports over 90% of its coking coal; it is long bauxite and short the cheap power that aluminium smelting needs at 14–15 MWh a tonne. Read the returns as you go down: miners earn 27–69% on capital, the integrated mills 8–13%, and several downstream fabricators beat the mills that supply them. Scale in this chain buys survival, not superior returns. Tap any stage to open it, then any company for detail.
At the head of this chain
Highest return on capital and fastest sustained sales growth among the 37 listed companies in this chain above ₹1,000 Cr market cap and ₹500 Cr revenue. Sustained growth is the lower of the 3-year and 5-year sales CAGR, so a single strong year cannot win it — Lloyds Metals & Energy compounded 72.2% over three years and 132.6% over five. Same rule on every map. Snapshot 8 Sep 2026.
How Indian metals work
Nine stages from orebody to fabricated product. Returns fall in the middle and rise again at the end.
- Margin pool
- Highest at the orebody — Hindustan Zinc earns 69.3% on capital, Hindustan Copper 42.4%, NALCO 39.6% — and again at downstream fabrication, where APL Apollo sells branded structural tube. Lowest in the middle, at integrated smelting: JSW 11.0%, Tata Steel 12.5%, SAIL 7.9%.
- Bargaining power
- Sits with resource holders and, increasingly, with coking coal exporters: India imports over 90% of what it needs. Steel mills have little power over either their input or their price, which is set globally by Chinese export volumes.
- Demand or supply led
- Supply-led and globally priced. Indian demand is strong but the price is set by world capacity, chiefly China's. That is why domestic safeguard duties exist at all.
- Who owns the customer
- Nobody owns a customer here — it is a commodity sold on specification and price. The exception is branded fabrication: APL Apollo and Astral sell to distributors and fabricators who ask for them by name, which is precisely why they earn more than the mills.
- Barriers to entry
- Highest at mining concessions, now auctioned and effectively closed, and at integrated smelting, which needs lakhs of crores. Lowest in fabrication and trading, which is why that stage is crowded and still more profitable.
- Threat of substitutes
- Aluminium substitutes steel in vehicles; composites substitute both at the high end. The larger substitute is scrap for ore — recycled aluminium uses roughly 95% less energy, and a scrap-fed furnace needs no coking coal at all.
This is a generalist read of how the industry typically works, not a rule. Anomalies exist at every stage — a well-run company in a poor part of the chain routinely beats a badly-run one in a good part, and structure changes with the cycle. Use it as a starting frame, not a conclusion.
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