"We spent Rs 8,000 crore in Q1. It should take us to Rs 35,000 crore capex in this year," said Alok Agarwal, Chief Financial Officer of Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL).
He said Q1 profit jumped by 13.7 per cent to Rs 5,957 crore on account of strong performance of the refining segment and significant contribution from shale and retail segments, which have now become a part of consolidated balance sheet.
"The results basically reflect mid-cycle performance of refining and petrochemical businesses," he said.
"Revenue growth would have been higher except for the fact that we did little bit of store rationalisation, improved margins, getting in to new location. We are happy with the way the business is showing quarter after quarter," he said.
On depreciation, he said, "Under the Companies Act, there is alignment of depreciation with useful economic life of assets and because of that we had a lower depreciation charge in the quarter. It was roughly Rs 200 crore lower than the previous quarter."
"The interest cost is sharply lower relatively to the previous quarter and that is again the reflection of the fact that we have had steady rupee in the past quarter.
"As virtually all our borrowings are dollar denominated and any depreciation of the rupee ended up being reflected through interest cost which is not there in this quarter."
Having done better than Asian peers on refining margins, he said refining hopefully will improve in the later part.
RIL is currently getting 30-40 cents lower than average Henry Hub price of about USD 4.5 per million British thermal unit in the last quarter.
Asked if the company is planning to park its cash surplus in instruments other than fixed maturity plans (FMPs), he said, "Unless things change, whatever maturity come up we have to move them in other avenues like short-term bank deposits, CDs directly rather than through FMPs. FMP was attractive but with these changes it will mean that attractiveness goes down."