Electrotherm (India) Ltd is fundamentally an engineering company that learned to make steel so it could prove its own furnaces work. It began by designing induction melting equipment for steelmakers, then built its own integrated steel plant in Gujarat in 2005 - becoming the only induction-furnace manufacturer in the world that also runs a steelworks, a live testing ground no competitor can replicate. That same pattern - build the machine, then use it yourself - later spawned an electric two-wheeler brand, making Electrotherm a three-engine industrial house where each business feeds the credibility of the next.
Business segments
Three engines at different stages - an engineering capital-goods original, a steel cash generator built on top of it, and a consumer electric-vehicle brand - each born from the one before.
1. Engineering & Technologies: the furnace-maker that taught itself steel
It designs and builds the induction melting equipment that small and mid-sized steel plants run on, with more than 6,500 installations in over 73 countries - and because it also operates its own steel plant, customers treat its factory floor as the reference site.
- The world’s showroom is its own mill - Electrotherm is the only induction-furnace manufacturer that owns an integrated steel plant, so every piece of equipment it sells has been proven in its own production before a customer ever sees it.
- Complete plant, one supplier - the division delivers turnkey EPC (Engineering, Procurement, and Construction) solutions that take a customer from raw mineral to finished rolled steel, one of only a handful of companies globally that can do this.
- Energy efficiency is the sales pitch - its furnaces are marketed as the “least energy consumers” in the market, and the division pairs them with custom air-pollution control systems so customers meet environmental norms without retrofitting.
- Equipment-as-a-service opens the door - smaller steelmakers who cannot afford a furnace upfront can access the technology through a pay-per-use model, which broadens the customer base beyond large capital-expenditure buyers.
- Industry 4.0 baked into the hardware - the equipment is laced with robotic process automation, IoT connectivity for remote troubleshooting, and artificial intelligence that adjusts parameters for stability and uptime, so a furnace in Africa can be diagnosed from Ahmedabad.
2. Special Steel: the integrated mill that carries the house
A fully integrated steel plant in Kutch making TMT bars and ductile iron pipes - the company’s largest revenue engine, built on the same induction technology it sells to others.
- One site, blast furnace to finished pipe - the Kutch plant houses blast furnaces, sponge-iron kilns, induction furnaces, a ladle refining furnace, rolling mills, and ductile-iron pipe lines, so iron ore enters one gate and branded TMT bars and DI pipes leave the other.
- Epoxy coating under one roof - it produces BIS-approved epoxy-coated TMT bars at a single integrated facility, which the company says is one of a kind in India, cutting out the transport and handling damage that happens when coating is done at a separate site.
- Iron ore, not scrap, makes the steel tramp-free - the division uses iron ore combined with ladle refining to produce Fe 500 D grade bars with sulphur and phosphorus levels tight enough for nuclear and railway approvals, avoiding the tramp elements that scrap-based steel can carry.
- Approved where the government builds - ET TMT bars are cleared for use by Indian Railways, the Nuclear Power Corporation, the Power Grid Corporation, the National Highway Authority, and more than 75 national and state-level project organisations, which turns a regional Gujarat brand into a national infrastructure supplier.
- Waste heat cuts the power bill - the plant captures waste heat from its DRI (direct reduced iron) kilns and reuses it elsewhere in the mill, lowering energy costs in a business where power is one of the largest input expenses.
3. Electric Vehicles: the consumer brand built on the steel backbone
Yo Bykes sells electric two-wheelers to both delivery fleets and retail buyers, with over one and a half lakh customers on the road and a dealership network that stretches across India.
- Born on the same Kutch campus - the EV manufacturing line sits inside the Special Steel Division’s site at Samakhiyali, sharing logistics, power infrastructure, and the parent company’s industrial know-how rather than starting from scratch.
- Fleet customers provide the base load - the division supplies e-commerce and logistics players including Amazon, Flipkart, and Big Basket, whose delivery riders put steady daily kilometres on the scooters and create a recurring replacement cycle.
- Powertrain manufacturing is coming in-house - the company is setting up to make its own powertrains in India rather than sourcing them, which would give it control over the most expensive component in the vehicle.
Group structure and partners
A family-run industrial house emerging from a decade of debt restructuring, now consolidated under one brother’s control with the other brother’s family exiting.
- The company operates through three reporting segments - Engineering & Technologies, Special Steel, and Electric Vehicles - with subsidiaries in India and China and a joint venture whose coal block was de-allocated by the government.
- A Family Settlement Agreement signed in March 2025 resolved a dispute between the two brothers: Shailesh Bhandari retains management control of the company, while Mukesh Bhandari and his family will transfer their combined 7.93% shareholding and exit.
- Of the original 19 lenders, ten assigned their debt to three asset reconstruction companies - Edelweiss ARC, Invent ARC, and Rare ARC - and the company has reached one-time settlements with ICICI Bank, UCO Bank, Vijaya Bank, Syndicate Bank, International Finance Corporation, Standard Chartered Bank, Union Bank of India (including debt of Corporation Bank), Central Bank of India and Invent ARC (for debts of Oriental Bank of Commerce), leaving only the settlement with Rare ARC (assignee of Indian Overseas Bank) still pending.
- The subsidiary Hans Ispat, whose TMT bar output was once consolidated into the company’s production figures, had its land and plant auctioned by Bank of Baroda in 2021, with the sale deed executed in mid-2024.
- Shailesh Bhandari was re-designated Executive Vice Chairman in February 2024 with oversight of everything except the Engineering division, while Suraj Bhandari was elevated to Managing Director to run that division - a split that maps the family settlement onto the operating structure.