NLC India Ltd will soon come out with an open tender for raising $600 million through the ‘external commercial borrowing’ (ECB), the company’s Chairman and Managing Director, Prasanna Kumar Motupalli, told businessline today.
Explaining the reasoning behind the fund raise, he said that the company had plans to put up 6.5 GW of renewable energy capacity in the next 5 years, adding to its existing 1.4 GW. This would call for a capital expenditure of about ₹40,000 crore. Four-fifths of this would come from debt.
Motupalli said that today the company is able to raise debt at an interest rate of about 7.8 per cent. An ECB issue would be able to lower this rate. He did not wish to divulge at what interest rates NLC India would be able to raise the ECB funds (which would set a reference mark for the funders), but he said that a 1 percentage point decline in the interest rate would mean about 14 paise reduction in the per-kWhr cost of energy produced.
Currently, the company is building about 2 GW of renewable energy capacity (mainly, solar), for which it would need about ₹14,000 crore.
Government holding falls
In a recent call with investors, the company’s Director - Finance, Dr Prasanna Kumar Acharya, observed that the government of India stake in NLC India had declined by 7 percentage points, to 72.2 per cent, from 79.2 per cent earlier.
₹1-lakh crore capex
The company told investors that it had planned a capital expenditure of ₹1-lakh crore by 2030 (including in thermal power plants and mines.) It said that it would require equity capital of ₹23,000 crore, which would come from “our internal resources only.”
Capital expenditure in the current financial years would be ₹3,200 crore, but would increase to ₹20,000 crore in 2026-27, the company told investors.
On the BSE today, NLC India’s share closed at ₹221, up by ₹4.40 (2.03 per cent) over the previous close.