WagooMusic

There’s no escaping the specter of Europe, not even in India.

Tata Steel, India’s largest and Europe’s second-largest steel producer, was hit hard in the quarter ending in September, sending its share price down 4.19 per cent on Friday as markets reacted to the company’s results announcement on Thursday.

Analysts blamed the poor numbers – which came in well below estimates – on the effect of the eurozone crisis on construction, a major customer of the steel industry, and on the rising cost of raw materials.

“It’s been pretty tough [for Tata Steel Europe]; the situation within Europe has never come back to the level of activities pre-financial crisis – the slowdown in demand has put pressure on the margins for this company,” said Sanjay Jain, analyst at Motilal Oswal.

Total group net profits for the quarter fell to $42.3m, down 89 per cent from $393.9m during the same period last year, despite a 15.7 per cent increase in consolidated net sales to $6.49bn.

Net sales for Tata Steel Europe – formerly the Anglo-Dutch company Corus, which the Tata Group bought in 2007 for $14bn – which accounts for 65 per cent of total group revenues, were up 19 per cent over the same period last year at $4.22bn.

Despite rising sales, Tata was hit by steel prices in Europe which Koushik Chatterjee, chief financial officer, told Reuters had fallen $30 per tonne on average, while raw materials prices rose $50 per tonne.

“They got squeezed between the finished product price cuts and the raw materials price increase,” Jain said.

Tata’s raw materials costs for the quarter increased 15.1 per cent to $2.16bn.

While also hit by higher prices of raw materials, the Indian arm of the group performed better than the European one. Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation for Indian operations for the quarter was down 16.9 per cent from the same quarter last year, at $557.3m, but ebitda for the European arm was down nearly 43 per cent, at $100.8m.

Tata Steel Europe needs to turn its ebidta around, Ravindra Deshpande, analyst at Elara Capital, told beyondbrics. But he says that’s unlikely to happen.

“There has to be margin expansion, which will not happen, and then even volume growth will not happen in the European arm,” he said. “So [it will] depend on the Indian arm of this company for the stock to perform.”

The Tata Group – which has been touted as the UK’s largest manufacturing employer – acquired Corus in 2007 in the biggest ever foreign acquisition by an Indian company. At the time, Corus was four times the size of Tata by volumes and the move was expected to turn Tata into a global brand.

But Corus has come with its own problems and became one of the biggest casualties of the 2008 recession – now that the financial crisis is back in full swing, so, too, are Corus’s troubles.

Related reading:Brazilian companies hit by eurozone fallout, FTBrussels cuts eurozone growth forecasts, FTArcelorMittal warns of weakening confidence, FT

Hello, Tori. So it’s great to finally speak to you.

Hi there. sorry you’ve been waiting. Don’t worry — you’ll get your full interview time. I won’t cut you short.

Well, that’s really sweet of you. anyway, your new album is a Celtic song-cycle inspired by Bach, Chopin and Debussy and produced in conjunction with classical label Deutsche Grammophon. not exactly going after the Lady Gaga market, are you?

I think Deutsche Grammophon saw the dangerous side of it. it was going to be a challenge. I’ve had a successful career. but if you get things wrong, you get it really wrong — as in publicly. to avoid that, I knew there had to be a lot of research. I thought it could be done.

Your daughter Natashya sings on the record. She’s also studying at Sylvia Young Theatre School in London (Amos lives in Cornwall with her husband). are you happy for her to follow in your footsteps?

It’s a brutal world, the music business. It’s not fair for me to say ‘you can’t do it,’ that’s not right. I’ve told her all the down sides; you expose yourself, instead of making music for the joy of it you open yourself to being criticised. she says, ‘well you do it’. and I say, ‘yeah — and I’m telling you I don’t know if you really want that’. she says that it is her decision, which of course it is.

You’ve sold 15 million albums. Surely you are immune to criticism by now?

It can be very destructive — if you start reading the good reviews you have to bad the bad ones. So you can’t read the good ones.

Alongside the new album you’re working on a musical for the UK’s National Theatre. What has that experience been like?

I have to tell you, it really hit me. As a composer you hear criticism, yes — especially live. but in this [the theatre] world, it’s just so different. I’ve been at auditions and the things you hear — ‘she’s too old’, ‘she’s not the right body type’. There is more criticism there than acceptance.

It’s 20 years since the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind. Your cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit gave a lot of people goose bumps. was it nerve-wracking to tackle such an iconic song?

There are certain pieces where it is almost as if the piano grabs me by the ankle and says, ‘there is a different perspective on this, the composition can hold it’. Certain things can handle a different interior design. when you are able to bring a different viewpoint I usually get a signal. The Bossendorf [Tori's choice of piano] … she will wink at me and say, ‘you should give me a shot at this’.

Armand Van Helden’s remix of Professional Widow was your first number-one single. It’s quite a radical re-imagining. What was your response when you first heard it? [Amos is rumoured not to be enamoured of Van Helden's hard-house interpretation]

It was different, right? I remember hearing it for the first time on a bus crossing the States. we knew we were going to listen to it. So there was a margarita party going on. There we were, on a bus dancing up and down through the mid-west. I appreciated what it was. I understood. It’s such a different art form, the construction and putting back together. it isn’t something I do. at the same time, they couldn’t have done it without the original.

Night of Hunters is out now. Tori Amos plays Grand Canal Theatre, Dublin, on November 9

Originally published in

Image Credit: Adam Taylor/FOX

Chase’s absence from the first four episodes of House’s new season have been painful for fans of the Aussie doc, but luckily, he and fellow veteran team member Taub (Peter Jacobson) are back on tonight’s new episode. but, as Jesse Spencer tells EW, their transition back to a team, which has seen the addition of two doctors (Odette Annable’s Jessica Adams and Charlyne Yi’s Chi Park), won’t be seamless.

“They have their disagreements [with the new team], obviously,” he says. “They have different clashes and different ways of doing things, but there is also a sort of nurturing — for lack of a better term. the [returning] characters give hints to the new characters about why House might be doing what he’s doing or which direction we think we should be going.”

There will, particularly, be some interesting interaction between Chase and new doc Adams. “There’s flirting that goes on,” he teases. “Adams is a very good looking doctor — House points it out straightaway, as he tends to do. And there’s a definite attraction between Chase and Adams, and we have some flirty scenes, but whether they actually go down that path or not, I’m not really sure. It’s not something that they’re going to focus on. I don’t think that’s the point of this season or the characters.” And while romance is always an option, he adds with a laugh, “Flirting and that sort of stuff is not really my forte.”

So what is Chase’s story this season? after years of slowly growing up and maturing on screen, Spencer says a number of Chase-centric episodes will “test him personally, professionally, and both.” “They’re writing for me a lot in every episode, and I think it’s going to be Chase’s best season,” he says.

But whether these episodes will be among his last on the show remains to be seen. like most House fans, Spencer says he’s aware that this season could be the show’s last. while nothing official has been said on the matter, Spencer said it’s hard not to be affected by the rumors. “Because that has been thrown about, I’ve kind of gotten a little bit sentimental about the whole thing,” he says. “after this year, it’s going to be a quarter of my life I’ve been working on this show. I think back to how quickly it all happened and then how much time and effort was put into the show, and I’m very proud of it.”

“I hope it doesn’t end and that they’d want to do another year, but if they feel like it’s the right time to end it, I trust that as well. I really leave that up to the gods. my job is just to keep my head down and make sure that I do a good job with the episodes that come to me this season … I’ll be very sad if it ends, but we can celebrate all the good work that was done over the last eight years. maybe even win an Emmy or something!” (Lanford Beard contributed to this report.)

Follow Sandra on Twitter: @EWSandraG

Read more:‘House’: Olivia Wilde says she’s likely done for good‘House’ react: what did you think of Thirteen’s exit?‘House’ react: did another episode of big changes leave you craving the familiar?