Mangaluru: The Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemical Limited (MRPL) held a media interaction on the 27th Annual General Meeting of the company at MRPL here, on 9 August 2015.
Chairman D K Sarraf discussed the 27th Annual Report for the financial year 2014-15 and also the results for the first quarter of 2015-16. Conveying the financial performance of the first quarter, he said that MRPL recorded profit of Rs 406 crore after provision of tax in the 1st Quarter 2015-16 as against loss of Rs 36 crore during the corresponding previous quarter. The increased profit is on account of increased margins in the products coming out of the secondary units in Phase III units and also on account of increase in the gap between the prices of crude oil and those of refined products. The Gross Refining Margin GRM (US$/BBL) for Q1 was 6.62 as compared to 0.66 for the previous year.
Speaking on the Polypropylene Unit (PPU), which successfully started commercial production of Polypropylene on 18 June 2015, he said that the unit is working very efficiently and it would contribute very significantly in the overall financial results and GRMs. With the commission and commencement of operation of the PPU, MRPL’s Phase-III of refining expansion is fully complete. “From here on, our efforts would be to do certain low cost increase in our capacity utilisation, which will be attempted in the coming quarters and years. We plan to increase the capacity of the refinery from 15 MMTPA to 18 MMTPA by doing certain debottlenecking in different units and transform ourselves by producing products which would be compatible with Euro 5 standard. Our refinery is already upto Euro 5 standards and can produce it to a very large extent. We have already achieved the Euro 5, which will come in a couple of years in the country, as far as HSD is concerned,” he said. Investments are also planned to ready the company to supply Euro-V/Euro-VI quality fuels to the nation.
MRPL has initiated a downward integration by amalgamation of ONGC Mangalore Petrochemicals Limited (OMPL). The Boards of both companies have approved the merger and formalities in terms of regulatory approvals are currently underway.
MRPL has retained its strong market presence in its Refinery zone for Petcoke, Sulphur and has also been able to get a good response for the new Polypropylene product introduced during this quarter. The company could evacuate on a consistent basis Petcoke and Sulphur in domestic as well as export market and by evacuating higher volumes of products in domestic market, exports could be reduced. The percentage of domestic volume during Q1 of FY 2015-16 stood at 70% as against 60% in Q1 of FY 2014-15. Typically net price realised in domestic market is more than that in export.
MRPL bagged the “Top Exporter Premier Trading House Award – NON- MSME Category” at the Export Excellence Awards organised by the Western Region of Federation of Indian Export Organisations (FIEO) on 22 July 2015 at Mumbai.
Speaking on the company’s retail plans, Sarraf said that the Board is convinced that this is the best time to roll out retail outlets. “We have planned around 100 retail outlets in and around Mangaluru and Karnataka in the first phase. We will come out with a formal announcement of the retail outlets very soon, he said.
When asked of MRPL’s future expansion phases, he said, “Not only Phase-IV, but further phases will also come because the team of MRPL has a huge potential in terms of their technical capability and the growth of MRPL will be quite high.”
