Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone, a group company of the beleaguered Adani Group, plans to prepay Rs 1,000 crore ($120.8 million) in commercial papers maturing in March, a company spokesperson said.
“This part prepayment is from the existing cash balance and funds generated from the business operations,” the spokesperson said in an email repose late on Monday.
Adani Ports has commercial papers worth Rs 2,000 crore due to mature in March, data from information service provider Prime Database showed. It had cash and cash equivalents of Rs 6,257 crore as of Dec. 31, per its latest quarterly report.
The company has also paid Rs 1,500 crore to SBI Mutual Fund on commercial papers that matured on Monday, as scheduled, it said.
On Monday, local media reported that Adani Ports has repaid Rs 500 crore to Aditya Birla Sun Life Mutual Fund against maturing commercial papers.
Both the fund houses did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Last week, Reuters reported Adani Enterprises and Adani Ports are likely to repay their short-term commercial papers debt, instead of rolling them over.
Adani Ports said in an analysts’ call earlier this month that it is considering repaying debt of about Rs 5,000 crore in fiscal 24, without specifying which bonds it would repay.
This, it said, would improve its net debt to EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) ratio to about 2.5 from more than 3 currently.
” … Our main objective is that we are generating cash. We want to use that money to repay the debt after meeting all the growth capex,” D Muthukumaran, chief financial officer of Adani Ports, had said in the call on Feb. 7.
