Adani, the Indian company that for years has championed construction of the proposed Carmichael project in Australia, a multi-billion-dollar undertaking that would purport to supply coal to India, is in trouble.
According to its 3QFY2017 quarterly results to December 2016, pretax profit excluding one off extraordinary items was down sharply year on year.
Drilling into the numbers we can see, the year-to-date pretax profit is down 37 per cent year on year. An 11 per cent increase in financing costs seems to have done the damage.
The way Adani announced it to the media was by declaring its profits had jumped 62 per cent but that’s an accounting change reflecting Adani Mining booking a profit on taking over Rio Tinto’s long term Abbot Point Coal Terminal take-or-pay (ToP) liability.
The ongoing losses relating to the Carmichael project in Australia appear to be capitalized into the balance sheet in the six year deferred expectation that this project will still proceed.
Clearly Adani’s finances are stretched which is why they are waiting for billion dollar loan from the Australian government.
Adani’s Carmichael mine poses a threat to the Great Barrier reef and Queensland’s tourism industry.
The numbers for Adani’s book tell us that the company is so stretched now financially that it won’t have the capacity to undertake the Carmichael Project.
The bottom line from my reading of it is that Adani is well-versed in running a business in India but has little experience running overseas operations. Carmichael is too big a risk. It won’t go ahead.
It will be interesting to see how long it takes for the Australian government, and for that matter the mainstream Australian media, will pick it up.
