Talukdar retires, Praveen Maheshwari is new Hindalco CFO

Sunirmal Talukdar has retired from his position of the group executive president and chief financial officer of Hindalco Industries Ltd on December 31, 2011. He was 60. Praveen Maheshwari, who was the executive director (finance) at Bharat Forge, part of the Kalyani Group, has taken over from Talukdar.

Maheshwari is a chartered accountant with an MBA from IIM-Ahmedabad. He was with the Kalyani Group for nearly three decades.

Sunirmal Talukdar, ACA, joined Hindalco on October 1, 1986 and worked with the company for 26 years before retiring on December 31, 2011.

Talukdar has been instrumental in the success of Hindalco Industries with his financial prudence. Hindalco, which acquired Novelis Inc for $6 billion, did not go for a leverage buyout of Novelis and decided to pay off the Novelis debt through recourse financing on Hindalco's own corporate guarantee, liquidating treasury stocks.

Hindalco, thus, gave helped Novelis to come out of its troubles, and post an EBITDA of $1 billion. It was then Novelis raised a debt of $4 billion and paid $1.7 billion divided to Hindalco.

After paying $1 billion for the bridge loan to buy Novelis, Hindalco is left with $700 million which it is using for its Rs 23,000 crore India expansion plans.

The company also raised $600 million via QIP in 2009 to fund the equity part of its expansion commitments. 

Under Talukdar, Hindalco achieved financial closures of its Rs 10,500 crore Mahan Mahan aluminium smelter The debt to equity ratio for this project is 75:25 with a loan agreement worth Rs 7875 crore signed with the banks.

The company, in the last fiscal, also attained the financial closure with financing of Rs 4906 crore for its 1.5 million tonne Utkal Alumina refinery. The project will be commissioned in the current calendar year.

Aditya Aluminium, which is identical to the Mahan project, is yet to achieve the financial closure of Rs 7875 crore. The project is expected to come on stream in early 2013.

The company is yet to launch financial closures for its Aditya Alumina and Jharkhand Aluminium projects which are expected to commission in 2014 and 2015 respectively.