Cairn India Q3 up manifold to Rs 604 cr

Cairn India today reported nearly 15-fold jump in net profit for the December quarter of the current fiscal, mainly on account of higher crude oil prices.
Net profit of Rs 604 crore, or Rs 3.21 per share, in the October-December quarter was 1,376 per cent higher than Rs 41 crore, or Rs 0.22 a share, net profit in the same period a year back, Cairn said in a statement.
The company got USD 46.2 per barrel of oil it produced in Q3, up 32 per cent over USD 35 a barrel realisation in the same period last year. Gas price was however 18 per cent lower at USD 5.9 per million standard cubic feet.

The higher price for oil was due to lowering of discounted price of its Rajasthan crude oil to benchmark Brent. "Rajasthan crude discount to Brent also lowered from USD 4.3 per barrel to USD 3.4, implying a reduction from 9.3 per cent to 6.9 per cent," the statement said.
Revenue was up 5 per cent at Rs 2,149 crore.
Oil production from its flagship Rajasthan fields was 9 per cent lower at 153,621 barrels per day because of a four- day shutdown the company had taken during the quarter.

Acting CEO of Cairn India Sudhir Mathur said: "We have made use of the challenging oil price environment to achieve competitive returns even at Brent USD 40 per barrel for planned projects. We are in active discussions with world class oil field services companies to partner for the end to end outsourcing of certain projects.

"This would help us further optimise costs, expedite project execution through better vendor coordination, and act as a force multiplier, allowing us to target a larger number of projects simultaneously. The alignment between OPEC members to address the global supply glut would further enhance our project economics as we look to aggressively scale up investments."
The proposed merger of Cairn with its parent Vedanta Ltd was approved by all sets of shareholders in September 2016 and the transaction is expected to be completed by March end, the statement added.