Thank you, RajendraJi. Good afternoon, everyone. So the objective is of course, we will take you through the financial highlights, but we're also trying to give a flavour of what's happening in the different segments in which we operate. And at the same time, how the company is looking at the next few months and few years. On the Q2 and H1 FY'25 highlights, as you can see on the chart, the quarter was a difficult one. I think we've delivered about ₹202 crores of EBITDA against roughly ₹311 crores of Q1. On an H1 basis, H1 to H1, Y-o-Y comparison, we are still 18% up ₹512 crore EBITDA against ₹434 crores. On a quarter-on-quarter basis, there was a compression in margins. If you sort of disaggregate this perfor mance on the volumes and margins front, I think on volumes, all of you are aware that the Energy business became a significant part of our portfolio and hence we're trying to give details of non-energy and energy business to get a better flavour of what's happening in the business. On non-energy business, both on Y-o-Y basis and Q-o-Q basis, there is healthy volume growth. We're talking about almost 22% volume growth on a Y-o-Y basis. And that uptick is visible across end applications, dyes, pigments, polymer additives. Agrochemicals continue to remain soft, but still there are some green shoots of recovery as we mentioned in the last call. So volume story on the non- energy remained relatively robust. Pricing pressure continues to persist and sort of we are navigating that to the best extent possible.
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The energy business is where the second quarter became tough. So we had a very good Q1 for the energy business. In Q2, on a Q-o-Q basis, there was a 36% drop on the volumes for the energy business, specifically MMA. And that was linked to a steep drop in refining margins. So both the absolute gasoline-crude delta as well as the gasoline-naphta delta crashed in the second quarter which is what led to reduction in demand of MMA. We will talk more about it as we go through it segment by segment. A little bit more on financial highlights going all the way to PAT, we are at roughly ₹189 crores in H1FY'25 versus ₹160 crores in H1FY'24. As I said, at aggregate entity level on a Y-o-Y basis, there's still a volume growth of 15%. I think there's an exceptional income of ₹2.3 crores, which is on account of divestment of stake in a step down subsidiary. Interest costs broadly have remained constant. I think the original anticipation was that the softening of interest rates will start benefiting from now, but that cycle has obviously got delayed. We expect that the benefits from that will accrue from the next quarter onwards. Depreciation has increased slightly as we sort of capitalise based on commercialisation of certain expanded capacities. And on the basis of H1FY'25 numbers, the Company's tax liability is declining and hence in that context corresponding deferred tax assets are also accrued. If you go to the underlying business performance, we also wanted to give you clarity on what's happening on volumes across different chains. And on the left hand side, you see most of the major product groups, right. So Nitro Chloro Benzene, DiChloro Benzene, Hydrogenation based molecules, the PDA chain, Nitro Toluene, Ethylation where we recently expanded capacity and MMA. And the capacities for some of them, wherever there is an expansion that has happened in the recent quarter or the expansion happening in the ongoing quarter, the numbers are based on expanded capacities. You can see the year- on-year trend on volumes for each of these chains. You also have details now of Q1 versus Q2 and H1FY24 versus H1FY25. The point that we made earlier, across the chains, except MMA, on a quarter-on- quarter basis the volume growth story still remains robust. On H1 FY '24 versus H1 FY '25 as well, except the NT chain, the volume growth remains robust. The capacity utilisation numbers tell you a story of operating leverage available for Aarti Industries Limited from a future growth point of view, especially the chains where we have recently expanded capacity like NT, Ethylation and MMA. The capacity utilisations are in the range of 50 to 60 odd percent, which means that as we ramp up those volumes linked to market demand growth, we have the ability to increase the size of the business without incremental Capex. MMA specifically, as you can see here, the volumes from Q1 to Q2 have dropped from 31 odd KT to 20.5 KT and that's predominantly driven due to the market factors. We'll go through it more in detail. The Ethylation capacity and the Hydrogenation capacity are multiple product groups based on that single chemistry. Hence the exact capacity sometimes varies depending on which products you're producing. For example in Ethylation, I can manufacture three, four different types of products and depending on which product I'm producing, the effective capacity utilisation may look different. Hence as you start looking at this number from a quarter-on- quarter point of view, you will see some variation depending on what product we are focusing on. That was a story on the production volume trend. Now coming to revenue by end use application. And this is where also significant evolution has happened over the last three years. If you look at the FY'22 split versus what you're seeing on FY '25 Q1 and Q2, you will see one obvious trend is of course Energy has become a significant part of the portfolio, it used to be relatively small in the range of 15%. Today, this quarter it came down to 32%, but was as high as 41% in the Q1. On the Agrochem, after registering a significant growth in FY '23, post that, I think that sector has been facing challenges and we've seen the story around inventory correction, pricing pressure, certain things to do with weather patterns, especially in North and South America. But that sector remains sort of under challenge, though their demand degrowth, as we said, has potentially bottomed out and the recovery is visible. Product by product the story changes, but there are certain green shoots in the sector. Dies, Pigments and Printing Inks remain relatively steady. The growth is linked to the economic cycle and GDP-linked growth. Energy applications are still evolving and have extremely large potential, but remain volatile linked to the refinery market dynamics in the gasoline-naphtha margin specifically for us. Pharma obviously had a significant volume growth during pandemic linked to the environment at that point in time, of course it has normalised post FY '24 beyond that. Polymer and Additives, which was earlier going through a lot of pressure from a demand point of view, has actually bottomed out and we have also seen a good recovery as far as the Polymer and Additives segment is concerned. Going segment by segment, Agrochem and Fertilisers, the key products that we supply in this segment are around – Chloro Anilines, Di Chloro Phenols and all the Ethylated products, roughly accounting about 19% of our overall revenue share, with decent mix of export and domestic, 40:60 odd kind of export:domestic mix. Market-wise, it remained challenging. All of us have talked about channel inventories, adverse weather conditions, so not going to go into that. Market environment will improve as we go into the 2025 calendar year, but the pricing pressures are expected to persist, because the overcapacity levels in China are quite significant across many of these products. To answer the question as to what are we trying to do about this, let me share that we continue to focus on higher market share. I think we would like to retain the market share. Wherever our capacity expansions pan out, we'll push for even more market share there. In the areas where we have expanded capacity and where the demand will take time to pick up, we are trying to develop alternate products to effectively use that capacity, especially in the Ethylation chain where we have expanded capacity. We are trying to build products, which are not only based on Ethylation, but also based on Propylation chemistry, so we can utilise that asset more effectively. We are also doing in couple of phases, with sort of very minor investments. Further backward integrations into certain products where we are already a purchaser and where we are already in the downstream product portfolio, so that improves the margin profile for that particular chain. And last one, but most importantly, we have invested significantly in our R&D and technology capabilities. So our ability to churn out new chemistries and new products is phenomenally high. In the current market environment, we're trying to see how we can leverage that capability, while operating in an asset light manner.
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So for instance, without investing assets on our own, can we use outsourcing tolling kind of models to serve the customers based on our technical and R&D capabilities. Now moving to Dyes, Pigments and Printing Inks, the big products here are PNCB, DCBH and PNT collectively contributing 12% of overall revenue share. Here it's more domestic, roughly 72% domestic and 28% export. On the market side, it’s overall stable, there was a temporary impact of Bangladesh due to political unrest, but it was temporary. The good thing here is that industry is going through consolidation, like, with Sudarshan Chemicals acquiring asset/business of Heubach. An Indian player becoming a major player of course helps, because we are one of the major raw material suppliers. There was a recent announcement of ADD on Sulphur Black from China. We supply one of the key intermediate going into that particular molecule. So we expect demand there to grow. On PNT as well, I think there is an announcement of initiation of ADD investigation. We will see how it concludes, but that could potentially also have a positive impact on this end market, particularly for us. In terms of our focus areas here, I think we actually expect both volume as well as margin improvement in the domestic market driven by industry consolidation. The major portion of this business actually operates on sort of spot/short-term contracts. Here we are trying to see if we can get consistent volume offtakes over a longer-term by getting into some of the partnerships/offerings some specific schemes. Energy Additives, major products here is MMA, of course Calcium Chloride as well, however MMA is relatively large part of our portfolio. For H1FY25, 37% of our revenue came from this segment dominated by exports. So 77% export, only 23% domestic. From a market point of view, as the gasoline-naphtha crack decline, it makes the octane boosting economics difficult. And let me actually go to the next slide and come back to the previous slide. This is the data on the gasoline-crude crack and the gasoline-naphtha spread. Both these numbers are important, because that's what drives the economics of using additive to boost octane. As you can see, Q4 onwards going all the way to Q2, the absolute gasoline-crude crack also compressed that was driven by higher refinery runs, globally and also little bit of seasonal patterns. The recovery in demand as the petrochemical market improves also relates to the naphtha cracks improved, which meant that the gasoline naphtha spread actually got compressed. While, in Q2 the compression was quite severe. that's what may be leading to a lower demand for octane boosters in general in the global oil and gas sector. So that was one of the significant reasons for volume impact for MMA in Q2. I think in terms of capacity, yes, few Chinese and Indian players have "announced" or have started manufacturing MMA at small scale, but the capacities are significantly less compared to where we stand. For us, the highlight is we've completed our expansion, our capacity is now roughly in the range of 200KTPA and we can expand it even further with a very minor investment. In the last quarter, we have also established bulk shipment capability for our strategic customer. There are certain large customers, which can take volumes in the thousands of KTs kind of order of magnitude. And now we have established that capability of how to serve those customers. We continue to push our efforts to diversify customers and geography base across. We were Middle East heavy for exports. Now we are targeting customers in U.S., Europe, Singapore and as well as other refineries globally. We've had
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initial success in U.S. We have done already a couple of bulk shipments, one actually went in October and we are hoping to scale up that business quite significantly over the course of next 12 to 18 months. We have also built our technical sales capability with the support from market experts. And we are looking for strategic tie-ups in select geographies with local distributors, which can give us access to new refineries. Given the high volumes involved, we are also aggressively working here on cost optimisation, both in process as well as logistics that will help improve the bottom line significantly going forward. On Pharmaceuticals, the major products we supply here are to the likes of PNCB, MDCB and some of the Fluorinated compounds. It forms a relatively small part, 9% of total revenue share. But this is completely a domestic story. 99% of the products here get sold in the domestic market. On the market side, the story remains quite robust. We continue to grow at 8% to 9% per annum. The U.S. Biosecure Act also gives us positive traction from sort of Indian pharma companies’ point of view. There is one specific market here, the PAP market, which is an intermediate for paracetamol, that witnessed slowdown due to significant pricing pressure. Also in the case of the Fluoro chain of the products specifically because of the overcapacity in that section in China that does have impact on pricing in the Indian market. Here we continue to focus on the domestic market. We are trying to increase the share of PNCB in the downstream PAP market. In select cases, wherever we see higher margin potential, we are trying to see export opportunities. And again, focusing on cost improvement efforts so that we increase our competitiveness against Chinese suppliers. And the last end application Polymer and Additives consists about 13% of revenue share. PDCB, MPDA and ONA are supposed to be the key products that go into this segment. Here it's mostly export heavy, 85% exports and 15% domestic. The product goes into applications like automotive, medical devices, electrical electronics, and also into the high temperature resistant polymers. Our end market is growing steadily. There's some dynamic here in terms of global trade flows, because one of the key product here PDCB, which goes into downstream polymer of PPS. There are trade barriers getting established globally, which means it is becoming more of a China and non-China kind of a market. And that's where our business highlights come into picture. We are targeting to increase the market share in the geographies of U.S., Europe and Japan, where the competitive intensity is different. We are also focusing on developing new markets for Plasticiser Additives. Typically, this market operates in a sort of one-to-three-year contract. There are regular renewals happening. We don't see any challenge over here. Given the nature of the contract here, we are also able to pass on the raw material pricing variation. The long-term contract – two, which was in the Polymer Additives space is actually performing well. This year we are seeing the highest volume from this particular contract. I think, given there are lots of conversations around sort of five or six long-term contracts that we have. We're also sharing update contract-by-contract. For Contract–one, as many of you are aware was the 10-year supply contract, which was cancelled in June 2020, long time back, for which we received the compensation of $120 million. That capacity currently remains underutilised. If you
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split that plant into two sections, precursor and the finished product, I think we are able to now utilise the precursor capacity. That has been very successful over the course of the last three to six months. However, on the downstream capacity we continue to work to develop new products so that we can utilise that capacity in a much better way. Contract – two, which was a 20-year supply contract for Specialty Chemical Intermediate, where the capital employed was also met from long-term customer advances. That plant, as I said, continues to operate at full capacity. This has been potentially the best year for that contract. And as per this contract terms sort of EBITDA is protected and is not linked to volumes. Contract – three, which was a 10-year supply contract again for a Specialty Chemical Intermediates is operating as per contract terms. This is expected to ramp up to peak levels in FY '27 timeframe. Here, the product stabilisation and qualification has taken bit of a longer time, but the commercial orders and deliveries have already started. And as it ramps up, we hope it will reach its sort of full potential by FY '27 timeframe. Contract – four, which was for Agrochem intermediate, again is going as per the contract terms. Here the peak will happen most likely in the course of next 18 months, because we have just expanded the capacity. The molecule produced here is based on the recent expansion. So as we ramp up that capacity, I think the corresponding contractual volumes will also increase. Contract – five, which was a four-year contract for a niche Specialty Chemical, given this is linked to the oil and gas market here, we are seeing month-on-month volatility driven by end use. But as I said, from a four-year timeframe point of view, we still see very robust potential for this contract. And contract – six is slightly different. It's a 20-year sourcing contract for purchase of Nitric Acid, which mitigated a risk for Aarti Industries from a key raw material purchase point of view. Again, it is operating as per contract terms and it will also give us supply security for one of the key raw material. Also some of the major savings from this contract will actually kicking in the second half of FY '26. So that will also help us improve the bottom line, once those savings start kicking in from the second half of FY '26 point of view. Now that was on the sort of a recent quarter and H1 updates. I think in terms of future outlook and roadmap, in the current market conditions, management team has taken a step back and charted out a path, a more concrete paths in terms of our focus areas and our deliverables from a three-year standpoint. And if you look at what are the key EBITDA drivers in the near term, right. If you start from here and go to FY '28. I think broadly we are classifying our focus areas into three buckets. There is a big focus on cost optimisation from where we are trying to see EBITDA potential of ₹150 crore to ₹200 crore. And I'll go through initiatives in detail. The second bucket of volume and margin ramp up. Especially in the areas where we have expanded capacity there's almost upside potential possible of ₹350 crores to ₹550 crores on EBITDA terms.
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And then there is a Capex-led growth, part of which, we had sort of announced in the previous calls, which will start delivering ₹300 crores to ₹450 crores, in the kind of timeframe that we're talking about FY '25 to FY '28. On cost optimisation, we're doing broadly three buckets – steam, power, fixed cost and then a little bit of yield improv ements. On steam several initiatives are already in the play. We've installed back pressure turbines in one of our zones. We continue to expand that to other zones. It's expected to deliver significant savings in terms of steam unlock potential. On renewable power, we did one phase last year, which got commissioned and is actually delivering savings right now. In this todays Board Meeting, we just approved second phase, which means by the end of 2026, we will have further savings from renewable power. And compared to our total external power purchase by that time more than 70% of our power will come from renewable source. That will also help us tremendously from a sustainability aspect and meeting our SBTI targets. I think we've taken a lot of initiatives around waste energy streams’ utilisation, ETP cost optimisation, both from solid waste management and disposal point of view, wherever we can use co-processing versus incineration or reducing the effluent load generation itself. So many of those initiatives will also start accruing over the course of the next six to nine months. On fixed cost optimisation, I think we went through a phase where we did lot of Capex, which is also linked to debottlenecking, asset upgradation, reliability, especially in our zone 1, zone 2, zone 3. As all of that gets completed, we actually see a significant opportunity to optimise on fixed cost. And that is sort of a deliberate effort that we are launching and we expect to see savings coming from that as well in the next six to nine months. And then there are technical initiatives, lot of initiatives around yield improvements, raw material cost optimisation. I will not go into details of that. But all of that in near-term should give us the benefit of ₹150-200 crores of EBITDA. The detailed initiatives are in the play and already under execution. I think on the volume and margin ramp up, Acid, DCB and NCB chains where the capacity expansion happened a bit earlier are already in a ramp up phase. And we see that over the course of next one, one and a half year, those value chains will ramp up where utilisations could start hitting upwards of 85%, 90% kind of levels. I think Ethylation and NT volume, where the capacity is just now getting commissioned, ramp up will happen over a bit more elongated time. But there also potentially in the course of next two years, we will see significant volume uptake without incremental investment. MMA volume ramp up is a long-term story. We already have a significant capacity available with us and as I mentioned, we can expand it further with very minor investments. Hence, we see this as a long-term growth story for us. We continue to invest, building our capabilities to serve the Energy sector and that could become a significant growth driver for us in the mid as well as in the long-term. And in Fluorination and Speciality Chemicals, wherever we are doing minor debottlenecking, I think, that capacity will also start coming into play and will help us too. So this bucket is a significant bucket of ₹350 crores to ₹550 crores depending on sort of demand and margin uptick, but over the course of next two to three years will add significantly to our bottom line.
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On Capex-led growth, we recently commissioned our pilot plant in the new zone 4 that will fuel our new product development because now we have ability to produce the new molecules developed by R&D technology and also get it qualified with end customers early. before the actual commissioning of the new assets. So that will help us tremendously. Our client development effort will get accelerated significantly with this pilot plant. The MPP, the Multipurpose Plant that we are setting up in zone 4 is likely to get commissioned by the middle of next year, it will also give us ramp up abilities to do molecules depending on margin profile happening at that particular point in time because multipurpose, our ability to switch the product portfolio is quite significant over there. And overall in zone 4, the commercialisation will happen gradually over the course of next 18 months kind of timeframe, but that ramp up will also start. That ramp up will not get completed in the three-year timeframe that we're talking about, but it will start accruing to the bottom line as we do phase-wise commissioning. And the UPL JV that we had announced two quarters back, there we are expecting in last part of maybe the FY '28 timeframe is where we will see some ramp up in volume and margin coming from that JV as well. If you look at all the three areas, we see significant EBITDA uptick potential in the near term. And near term, we are defining it as sort of by the FY '28 kind of timeframe. Now from a long-term even beyond FY '28, which are the areas, where we have to also act now, to ensure that we capture upside from there. Broadly speaking, as Rajendra ji mentioned, our core strengths are around three aspects, Sustainable Manufacturing, our R&D tech capabilities and our Customer Relationships. And on the basis of that, there are three areas we're focusing on. One is, how do we leverage the R&D and tech capability to drive asset light growth. It's a very unique capability. We feel we are one of th e best in the industry as well as where the domestic market is concerned. Next is how do we utilise this capability to launch new chemistries and use the asset light model including tolling outsourcing, but where we can do commercialisation much faster, is going to be one of the priority focus areas. We have already done two pilots, some initial success and we will scale this up as we go through mid-to-long-term kind of stuff. Strategic alliances have always remained a priority for Aarti Industries and will remain a priority. I think as we speak there are five plus projects where there are active conversations happening for different chemistries. There are different phases, these include the likes of backward integration for a Polymer where we are already in a long-term tie up or intermediate for end use in personal care or a polymerisation project for oil additives. So there are different types of chemistries for different types of end markets, it is a pretty diversified set of relationships and we hope to conclude some of the strategic partnerships towards the course of the next six to twelve months. And then early bets on new sectors, right. I think we mentioned this, but there are three themes we are focusing on where potentially we could grow with partnerships as well as joint ventures. The models could look very different. I think on Circularity and Chemical Recycling, we see a huge upside, both linked on our strengths as well as based on domestic market potential that's area we continue to remain focused on. On Electronic chemicals, we are in active conversations and we hope to make some early bets to capture the tailwind in that particular
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sector. And the Speciality Chemistries used in battery materials remains another focus area where we're doing joint development with few players, which could potentially commercialise in sort of three to five years kind of timeframe. So putting this together, where do we see from a growth outlook point of view? I think this year is expected to remain broadly similar to last year, roughly ₹1,000 crores to ₹1,050 crores kind of EBITDA given the challenges that we are going through. But from FY '28 timeframe, I think we are targeting somewhere in the range of ₹1,800 crores to ₹2,200 crores kind of EBITDA, predominantly driven by consistent volume growth over three years because of our increased capacities. The operating leverage and the cost optimisation initiatives that we talked about will add significantly to EBITDA, which is completely in our control. I think the Capex plan has been optimised and moderated. So this year is expected to be in the range of ₹1,300 crores to ₹1,500 crores versus earlier estimate of ₹1,500 crores to ₹1,800 crores. So that has gone down and the Capex for FY '26 is also estimated to be around ₹1,000 crores. It's a part of zone 4 and the maintenance Capex, but significantly lower than FY '25. I think as management, the three-year outlook that we're taking is both on sort of health of the balance sheet as well as the bottom line performance. We're saying that we target less than 2.5x of debt-to-EBITDA, ROCE of greater than 15% and EBITDA in the range of ₹1,800-2,200 crores, which we feel is a realistic with a stretch kind of aspiration and feel very confident of delivering on it. So with that, let me conclude. I think the presentation will be available to all of you and we are happy to start Q&A. Thank you.