By Sethuraman N R
(Reuters) -India’s Adani Enterprises, the flagship company of the Adani Group, on Thursday reported its biggest quarterly profit slump in three years in the third quarter, as a fall in power demand weighed on its key coal trading division.
The company’s consolidated net profit declined to 578.3 million rupees ($6.68 million) in the October-December quarter, from 18.88 billion rupees a year ago.
This was Adani Enterprises’ worst quarterly profit fall since the quarter ending Dec. 31, 2021, when it swung to a loss.
Its shares fell as much as 5% to their lowest since Nov. 27 after the results and were among the top losers in the benchmark Nifty 50 index, which was up 0.2%.
Last November, U.S. authorities accused the group’s billionaire founder Gautam Adani and other executives of being part of a scheme to pay bribes to secure Indian power supply contracts. The group has denied the allegations.
Adani Enterprises’ overall revenue fell about 9% to 228.48 billion rupees.
The coal trading division was hit by lower volumes, while its profit was impacted by a foreign exchange loss at its Australian business.
Adani Enterprises reported a forex loss of 2.96 billion rupees, compared with a gain of 1.01 billion rupees a year ago.
The company’s profit also took a 3 billion rupees hit from its exit from the consumer goods joint venture with Singapore’s Wilmar International, Adani Enterprises said, without giving further details. Revenue from the coal trading segment, which contributes more than a third of overall revenue, fell 44% to 89.80 billion rupees.
India’s coal demand softened in the quarter, with power generation growing only 3% amid weak industrial demand and a broader slowdown in the economy, according to analysts.
($1 = 86.5640 Indian rupees)
(Reporting by Sethuraman NR and Nandan Mandyam ; Editing by Mrigank Dhaniwala and Eileen Soreng)
