Month: November 2007

The board of Diamond Cables has approved to accept a loan of Rs 68 crore from GE Capital. The said loan shall be for tenure of 5 years with a moratorium of 1 year. On completion of this project the company shall be amongst the top three power cables manufacturer in the country.

Looking at the bright prospects of the company and its growth plans the company requires long term working capital funds, which will enable its big ticket entry in Turnkey T&D projects. The board has approved a Loan of Rs 160 crore from clearwater capital partners lid, out of which tranche A of the loan comprising Rs 90 crore shall be repaid in one year and tranche B of the loan comprising of Rs 70 crore will be repaid in 5 years time.

This debt aggregating Rs 228 crore which is now raised from Clearwater Capital Partner and GE Capital will greatly enhance the companies working capital and result in maximum usage of assets and resource resulting in large scale increase in the top line of the company.

Sterlite Optical Technologies has received a contract from BSNL valued at Rs 1.43 billion for supply of copper telecom cables. These cables would be used to enhance BSNL’s pan-India network to provide basic telephony and broadband services.

Broadband services have sparked off a fresh wave in demand for wire line connectivity with leading telecom incumbents in India opting to launch broadband services using the ADSL 2+ technology, which has given copper cables a fresh lease of life. The copper cables are used for the last mile wiring for landline phones while fiber optic cables are used up to the junction box.

Punj Lloyd has announced that Sembawang Engineers and Constructors, a wholly owned subsidiary of the company has been awarded a major turnkey contract worth Rs 1770 crore for engineering, procurement and construction work at the new mega aromatics plant on Jurong Island, Singapore by Jurong Aromatics Corporation.

The contract was awarded by Jurong Aromatics Corporation (JAC) which had recently announced plans to develop the world-scale US$ 2 billion JAG complex that will produce energy and aromatic products to regional end-users as well as to global downstream producers and traders in the textile md plastics industries.

Under the terms of the contract, Sembawang E&C will be responsible for the engineering, procurement and construction of all the ancillary facilities, including the intermediary and finished product tenkage, receiving and exporting jetties, power and steam co-generation plant, waste water treatment unit as well as other utilities and infrastructure which are necessary to provide support to the main conversion units.

Work on the JAG complex will start in 2008 and is slated for completion in 2011. Upon completion, the JAG acuity will have a capacity of around 1.5 million tonnes of aromatics, comprising 800,000 tonnes of para-xylene, 200,000 tonnes of ortho-xylene, and 450,000 tonnes of benzane, as well as about 2.5 million tonnes of petroleum products.

With this, the order backlog for the Punj Lloyd group on consolidated basis ha gone up to Rs 18,622 crore. This is the total value of unexecuted orders as of 30 September 2007 end new order, received till date.

Usha Martin’s consolidated Topline and EBITDA grew 11% and 6% Y-o-Y at INR 5.8 bn and INR 903 m against our expectation of INR 5.7 bn and INR 801 mn. This was achieved due to higher proportion of value added products in the sales mix and good increase in realization (ranging from 5 to 10% YoY). Net profit at INR 460 mn was ahead of expectations.

At Rs 89, the stock is trading at an EV/EBITDA of 9.6x and 7.5x and at PE of 15.4x and 10.0x FY08E and FY09E earnings.