Business Standard

The Reliance game plan

The Facebook investment is a high-stakes gambit with dual possibilities

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Prabal Basu Roy
With the crash in oil prices, its structural decline as a commodity is a given. Excess global capacity and lower demand for oil-based products imply erosion of refining margins — GRMs of $11 per barrel is now history.

It is in this context that Reliance is co­nverting its debt to equity. This is an antithesis to its DNA — it has from 1977 followed a path of growth predominantly through high debt and financial engineering. Why? Because it was confident of free cash flows for debt repayments on a sustainable basis and in the process created enormous wealth for its
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