The company's turnover of Rs.318 billion was a 32 percent improvement over the previous year, said V.S. Jain, the chairman of SAIL announced Wednesday.

"Emerging as one of the top profit-making companies of the country, SAIL is now set to perform on full throttle and blaze a new trail in the future," he said.

The achievement during 2004-05 fiscal was crowned by best-ever quarterly performance in fourth quarter when all the seven steel plants of SAIL showed net profit.

Capitalising on a buoyant steel market, including overseas, SAIL had increased production and sales volumes through improvement in product mix by optimizing output of value-added products and increasing the proportion of special steel, higher utilisation of the continuous casting process, improvement in techno-economics and prudent financial management.

Maintaining its average capacity utilisation at 104 percent, SAIL achieved a record production of 11 MT of saleable steel.

Better revenue generation during the year enabled SAIL to reduce borrowings to the level of its deposits in various banks, implying virtually zero-debt status for the company.

"SAIL has an ambitious plan of increasing hot metal production through integrating steel plants to around 20 MT by 2011-12," said Jain.

During this period the company will increase its crude steel production by around 7.0 MT, and the proportion of semis in the overall saleable mix will be reduced to four percent from the current level of 16 percent.

With an overall investment target amounting to around Rs.250 bilion, the company has already initiated measures to attain the milestones in a graded manner.

Capital schemes valued at over Rs.30 billion are under various stages of implementation, and schemes of similar amount are likely to be taken up for evaluation and approval in the current year as well, said Jain.

The SAIL Board of Directors have recommended final dividend of 18 percent on paid up equity amounting to Rs.7.43 billion for the company's shareholders. Of this, the government will get about Rs.6.38 billion as the major shareholder.

The company earlier paid interim dividend of 15 percent of the paid-up capital for 2004-05.