Piramal Enterprises reduce debt by Rs 17,500 crore last year, plans minority stake sale in pharma biz

Mumbai-based diversified conglomerate Piramal Enterprises on Tuesday said it has brought down debt by Rs 17,500 crore last year and is looking at minority stake sale in the pharmaceutical business.

In an interview to CNBC-TV18's Nisha Poddar, Ajay Piramal, chairman, said the company had taken new tax rate of 25 percent, and had to write off some of the benefits and the extra provision that we have done for this is Rs 1,800 crore.

Piramal said the company has done a COVID-19 provision of Rs 1,900 crore in terms of the assets and the non-performing assets (NPAs), "So today before this, our NPA at the end of last quarter was 1.8 percent of the book. Now we have taken it up to 5.8 percent. I don’t expect that it should be of any recurring nature and should not appear. We are confident that our total provision, which is now Rs 3,000 crore, in the company should be adequate to meet the challenges that the present situation provides."

Piramal said the amount of moratorium that the company has given or we would have expected during this time would be about Rs 3,000 crore of liquidity, which would be there from the time the moratorium was announced till the end of May.

“At the end of March, we had cash and undrawn bank lines of Rs 8,000 crore. Out of that in April itself, the company got long-term loans of Rs 4,000 crore from different banks. Therefore, there is enough liquidity. The amount of moratorium that we took is only Rs 750 crore and that is also out of abundant caution. We have made significant amount of payments during this period and I am comfortable to say that liquidity will be managed by us,” he further mentioned.