Standalone earned more than the whole group.

We lock a binary: Tata Steel's reported consolidated EBITDA for Q2 FY2027 is INR 6,000 crore or higher. Confidence 90%.

Q1 FY2027 consolidated EBITDA was INR 9,370 crore. Our threshold sits about 36% below that — by far the widest buffer in this tranche, and it is built out of three separate, disclosed problems.

Tata Steel's Q1 FY2027 produced an arithmetic oddity worth pausing on. Consolidated EBITDA was INR 9,370 crore. India standalone EBITDA was INR 9,409 crore. The standalone figure is HIGHER than the consolidated one, which means everything outside India netted to slightly negative.

The Netherlands is the reason. It turned over EUR 1.4bn of revenue in the quarter and produced EUR 4m of EBITDA — a margin of roughly a quarter of one percent — after the direct sheet plant was shut down over chrome emission exceedances, cutting volumes and profitability.

That is a live, unresolved, regulatory-driven outage in a business large enough to erase the contribution of everything the group owns outside India. A lock on Indian operations alone would be a materially easier and much less honest claim, so the criterion names CONSOLIDATED, which is where the risk actually sits. Coverage also carried India crude steel output as both 5.76 Mt and 5.82 Mt, which is a second reason to score the consolidated financial line rather than a physical Indian one.

One tranche ago this series scouted Coal India and dropped it, because every available anchor was a Q1 figure and Q1 is Coal India's seasonal peak — a level-anchored lock off it would have been anchoring on the best quarter of the year.

Tata Steel has a version of the same problem. Indian steel demand softens through the monsoon quarter, which is precisely the July-to-September period this lock covers, so Q1 is again the flattering comparison. The difference is that here the effect can be sized rather than merely feared: Indian steel is a large, well-documented seasonal pattern in a business whose quarterly EBITDA is published, whereas Coal India's distortion also included a 28.93 million tonne inventory drawdown of unknowable repeatability.

So the response is a wider buffer instead of a drop. Seasonality does not always mean walk away. It means drop it when you cannot size it, and widen it when you can.

The third component is the war. Tata Steel quantified about INR 1,200 crore of unplanned energy, freight and logistics cost in Q1 alone, attributed to the West Asia conflict. That is the most precise number any company in this series has put on that shock, and there is no indication it reverses inside Q2. Set against all three, INR 6,000 crore leaves room for a monsoon quarter, a still-impaired Netherlands and continued war costs, without requiring any of them to improve.

The residual 10% is a sharper collapse in steel spreads, a deeper Netherlands outage, or Chinese export pressure compressing Indian realisations at the same time.