GMR Infrastructure, which reported a three-fold increase in net loss to close to Rs 180 crore for second quarter of Fy13, has said that as much as close to Rs 1,500 crore is pending from just two entities – Air India and Tamil Nadu government.
“Air India owes us around Rs 650 crore including at our airports at Delhi and Hyderabad, while Tamil Nadu government owe us another close to Rs 800 crore. The total outstanding for our airport sector is around Rs 890 crore, while the power sector has receivables outstanding of Rs 880 crore. So when you take into account receivables of close to Rs 2,000 crore and the inherent need to provide working capital, we are at a loss,” A Subba Rao, Group CFO, GMR Infrastructure said. He added that they are in discussions with the respective authorities to see how this issue can be sorted out.
While the revenues at Delhi International Airport grew by a healthy 36 per cent at Rs 1469 crore, the losses have been reduced substantially to Rs 28 crore for second quarter of Fy13 as compared to the corresponding loss of Rs 210 crore. "The increase in airport tariff at DIAL is having a good impact and that itself pushed our revenues by 90 per cent. With sustained growth, hopefully we should be recouping our accumulated losses of close to Rs 1,700 crore over a period of time," added Rao.
While there has been decent revenue growth of 18 per cent for the company at Rs 2399 crore, the fact that they are sitting on idle assets in the power sector due to non-availability of gas in the East coast, is taking a huge toll on its profitability.
“Higher revenues from the operation of airports during the quarter aided by the revised tariff and UDF charges at DIAL resulted in significant improvement in the turnover which however, was adversely affected by the lower PLF in power plants due to non-availability of gas from KG basin,” said G M Rao, Group Chairman, GMR Infrastructure.
The company, along with other players who are hit by this factor, have been discussing with the relevant authorities to do a pooling mechanism with which the imported gas and locally available gas can be leveraged to fuel the projects. “The cost of the gas from this mechanism will double to $8.4 per MMBtu. Based on this, we may have to rework the PPA’s as well and we are looking at hiking it by around 55 per cent, if things sail through,” a senior official of GMR Group said.
GMR Infrastructure, currently has generating capacities of around 880 Mw, most of which are on based on gas, due to which the company has been facing intense pressure on its margins. “During the next two quarters, we should commission around 1600 Mw based on thermal fuel and that should offset the losses in the gas-based projects until the KG-basis issue is sorted out,” the official added.
The company, which is looking to deleverage its balance sheet which is under a debt of Rs 35,000 crore with a gearing of 3.2 times, has said that hopefully by end of this fiscal couple of key steps will be taken in this direction.
