Sumant Sinha
Analyst · Bank of America
Yes. Thank you for that Nathan, and a good morning to everybody. We are extremely pleased to host our very first earnings call as a publicly traded company. We believe that RNW is one of the most compelling investment opportunities in the renewable energy sector today. Some of you may be new to our exciting story and we will provide a brief overview of our company and near term strategy, followed by an update on recent developments as well as deeper dive into our first half and second quarter fiscal ‘22 financial results. If we turn to the presentation and looking at our portfolio on page 5, ReNew is one of the leading renewable energy companies in India and also one of the largest renewable energy companies globally. Our scale and our vertical integration differentiates us in multiple ways including being more efficient at lower cost, having greater access to cheaper capital, and investing for the future to retain our competitive edge in what is still a young and rapidly evolving market whilst also maintaining industry leading EBITDA margins. We now have a long track record of execution as well as delivering superior growth and returns over a long period of time. When we first started with our 25 megawatt project about a ten years ago, there were many companies that were interested in getting into the Indian renewables sector. Over time, we have been able to consistently grow faster than the industry while remaining disciplined with our capital allocation. Much of this success lies in our corporate culture of thinking ahead, making judicious investments for sustaining our competitive advantages ahead of time. And I now stress this because this is in fact a very important ingredient of our success as a company. We have renewable assets spread across the country which provides diversification and operating expertise in many states of India. By being local, we are able to capture synergies from acquisitions which most of our foreign competitors cannot avail. About two-thirds of our portfolio is operating and much of the assets that are in development already have PPAs. And I must add that our portfolio is well-balanced between solar and wind. And this expertise is critical as we look for the future where we’ll see more and more bids happening, which require a combination of both wind and solar. On page, we remain on track to deliver our previously announced guidance. As of today, we have 7 gigawatt operating, up from 6.3 gigawatts that we had operating on September 30, 2021, and we have about 400 megawatts scheduled to be commissioned in the next couple of weeks. This strategy also makes us the first company in India to now get to 7 gigawatts of commissioned renewable energy capacity. As a result, we continue to expect our FY22 adjusted EBITDA, excluding the impact of weather, which was approximately $40 million in the first half of this fiscal year so far, to be approximately $810 million, and we will have approximately 8.2 gigawatts operational by the end of this fiscal year. We want to therefore point out that 95% of our expected FY22 EBITDA is coming from operating or nearly completed capacity. We expect to deliver EBITDA of over $1.1 billion annually from our 10.3 gigawatt portfolio, which is nearly double our EBITDA that we reported last year. We are confident that achieving this growth as about $1 billion of EBITDA should be generated from commissioned projects or have a signed PPAs and are in the construction phase already. Moving into presentation on to page 7, we believe that we have a total addressable market of around $200 billion to $270 billion for generating within India. The majority of this market is in the bid market. The Indian Prime Minister at the recent COP26 summit in Glasgow, outlined a fivefold strategy, which included getting India’s non-fossil energy capacity to 500 gigawatts by 2030; two, 50% of India’s energy requirements will be met by renewable energy by 2030; three, India to reduce its committed carbon emissions by 1 billion tons by 2030; and four, carbon intensity will fall by 45% by 2030, and India to achieve net zero by 2030. These are very fundamental announcements that I think will position India very strongly on the path towards the energy transition. Today, there are about 8 to 10 gigawatts of auction scheduled over the next quarter, and there are numerous more intelligent energy solution auctions in the works. The M&A opportunity is also very large and we see around 30 to 50 gigawatts of M&A opportunities in the coming time. Currently there is about 6 to 8 gigawatts that is up for sale at this point. We have a significant amount of experience with M&A having acquired over 2 gigawatts in the last five years. A market we are also very excited about is the corporate PPA market. To be clear, this is not rooftop projects and we are supplying customers from utility scale projects. We see a corporate PPA market in India of at least 25 gigawatts over the next few years. We also continue to believe that we will be able to deliver our aspirational goal of 18 gigawatts operational by the end of FY25. And we are in fact fully funded at this point for the target to be achieved. Turning to page 8, we reiterate our commitment to our shareholders that we will be diligent stewards of your money and only invest when the expected returns on projects are above our cost of capital. Today, we have a threshold requirement of 16% to 20% equity IRRs. There are many opportunities in our view to achieve returns above our minimum thresholds. And whilst we have competitive advantages that allow us to achieve returns within our targeted ranges in the plain vanilla renewable energy projects, we expect that an increasing portion of our growth will come from areas that have higher returns and where there is less competition. We have competitive advantages in intelligent energy solutions, on the M&A side and the corporate PPA market that many of our competitors will not be able to address for some time. We have a large market share of projects that require intelligent energy solutions which have higher returns and lower levels of competition. We are also one of the best positioned to be the consolidator of choice in India, and these acquisitions have the potential to have higher returns than plain vanilla projects given the amount of synergies we are able capture as an incumbent of scale. We are also very excited about the corporate PPA market which provides significant upside to the guidance we have provided to investors. As we’ve said, we continue to be active on the M&A front as well. We have closed both of our recently announced acquisitions, a 99 megawatt hydro facility and a 260 megawatt solar project in Telangana. There are a significant amounts of assets up for sale currently and, based on the current market dynamics, we believe that we can purchase projects and achieve a better return than in the plain vanilla renewable energy market. We are on track to have 8.2 gigawatts operating by the end of this fiscal year. Currently, we have 7 gigawatts operating, as I said earlier, or about 600 megawatts more than our Capital Markets update about a month ago and we expect another 400 megawatts to be on line over the next couple of weeks. I must also say that recently we received recognition by Fortune magazine globally as being one of the top 10 global companies that will change the world. In addition, we are the only renewable energy company to have received the lighthouse award by the World Economic Forum for our proprietary development of IR technology to improve the operations of renewable energy facilities. Let me now turn it over to Muthu to discuss the quarterly results and the half year numbers. Muthu, over to you.