INR 9,373 crore. Tata Steel made INR 9,370.

We lock a binary: JSW Steel's reported consolidated crude steel production for fiscal 2027 is 25.0 million tonnes or higher. Confidence 91%.

Guidance is about 28-29 Mt. Our threshold sits roughly 10.7% below the floor of that range, and about 5% below the 26.4 Mt implied by annualising the 6.59 Mt produced in Q1.

One tranche ago this series locked Tata Steel at P-326 on consolidated EBITDA, noting Q1 FY2027 consolidated EBITDA of INR 9,370 crore. JSW Steel's Q1 FY2027 consolidated adjusted EBITDA was INR 9,373 crore.

Three crore apart. Two different companies, two different asset bases, two different management teams, the same quarter, and a difference of about three hundredths of one percent. That is not a coincidence to be enjoyed and moved past. It is one Indian steel spread — the gap between finished steel realisations and the cost of iron ore and coking coal — being expressed twice.

So P-326 and P-337 are not independent locks. If Chinese export pressure compresses Indian realisations, or if coking coal runs, both come under pressure together. This series has made the same disclosure twice before: at P-308, where Contact, Meridian and Mercury share one New Zealand catchment, and at P-314, where SK Hynix, Korean exports and Samsung's memory division ride one AI upcycle.

The mitigation here is that the two locks are on different metrics. Tata Steel is locked on rupees of EBITDA, which moves directly with the spread. JSW is locked on TONNES PRODUCED, which does not — a mill runs its blast furnaces on capacity and order book, not on margin, and production holds up through spread compression far better than earnings do. The correlation is real but the two rows will not necessarily fail together.

JSW's Q1 disclosure carries consolidated crude steel production of 6.59 Mt, Indian crude steel production of 6.35 Mt, and Indian sales of 6.02 Mt. Three quantities, all in millions of tonnes, all describing the same quarter, and 0.57 Mt separating the largest from the smallest. The criterion names CONSOLIDATED CRUDE STEEL PRODUCTION and rules out the other two, because the 28-29 Mt guidance is stated on that basis.

The threshold at 25.0 Mt assumes the guidance is missed. Annualising Q1 gives about 26.4 Mt, which is already below the 28 Mt lower bound — so hitting guidance requires acceleration through the year, not merely continuation. That acceleration is plausible: BF-3 at Vijayanagar has been expanded to 4.5 MTPA from 3.0 MTPA and was under shutdown during Q1, so its restart adds capacity that Q1 did not have, and Indian operations were already running at about 94% utilisation excluding it.

But this series does not lock a company's guidance when the run rate does not yet support it. 25.0 Mt asks that production hold roughly at the current pace rather than accelerate to plan, which is the claim we are actually confident about.

The residual 9% is an unplanned outage at a major blast furnace, a raw material supply interruption, or demand weakness deep enough that the company throttles output rather than build inventory.