Specialty steel company Mukand Ltd plans to sell off a portion of its land-bank to reduce its debt of around Rs 1,500 crore over the next one year, a top company official said.
"We plan to sell-off some of our land-bank over the next one year to reduce our debt, which currently stands at around Rs 1,500 crore," Mukand Co-Chairman and Managing Director Rajesh Shah told PTI here.
While he did not disclose how much the company aims to raise by way of this sale, it is estimated that it would fetch around Rs 750-800 crore.
The company has land-holdings in Maharashtra, especially in the Mumbai-Pune-Nashik belt and in the southern state of Karnataka.
"We have around 42 acres at Sinnar (Nashik), 40 acres at Lonand (Pune) and 210 acres in the Thane-Belapur area. We also hold around 250 acres at Giningera in Karnataka," Shah said.
The company's present capacity utilisation of specialty steel products stands at 27,000 tonnes per month (tpm), which it intends to scale up to 35,000 tpm by February 2010 and then to around 40,000 tpm by June 2010, Shah said.
Mukand clocked five-fold increase in its profit after tax (PAT) in Q2 FY10 at Rs 16.35 crore as against Rs 2.93 crore in the year-ago period.
Its turnover, however, dipped 15.3 per cent to Rs 559.74 crore as against Rs 661.24 crore in the year-ago period.
"The decline in turnover is partially due to the reduction in the rate of excise duty and also that in the steel-selling prices during last year after the fall in input prices," the company said in a statement.
Input prices, however, are now on the rise, Shah said, adding that the company upped the prices of its specialty steel by 5-7 per cent in October.
Shah expressed optimism about his company's performance in the remaining two quarters of this fiscal.
"We should continue our upward trend in growth," he said.
