‘After Rosneft deal, Essar group can now grow rest of its portfolio’
The phase of consolidation and monetisation of assets is over in the Essar group, says CEO Prashant Ruia after seeing through the $12.9-billion sale of Essar Oil to a Rosneft PJSC-led consortium. The group is preparing a resolution plan for Essar Steel which is under an interim resolution professional and Ruia hopes to retain control. Edited excerpts from an interview: We have said ₹70,000 crore is more than 50%, the balance will be less.
The key part that has been missed is Essar’s strength to create world-class assets, starting from scratch in core sectors. We did that in telecom. We made certain investments over a period of 10 years and then we exited after selling to Vodafone. We made 10X return on our investment. We did that with Aegis. We decided to exit, and we got 5X returns. Now we have done it in oil. When we did the IPO in 1995, our market cap at that time was ₹2,000 crore. Now we have exited. The final number is ₹50,400 crore. for the past 15 years.
We have got oil and gas, steel, ports, power. The ability to grow in power is limited because of the surplus in the market. We are looking at the whole set.
We had to consolidate, monetise and complete the capital investment programme of ₹1.2 lakh crore, that phase is over. Now we are looking at the next phase. We are in the IBC (insolvency and bankruptcy code) process. We will respect the process. We will provide a resolution plan as we had provided earlier, which we gave to Indian lenders. We hope it will be successful. We hope we can restructure the business. It’s too early to say.