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State-owned Hindustan Copper Ltd (HCL) may raise ₹800 crore to fund expansion and diversification projects, according to a senior official.
Responding to a query during the company’s press conference here on Tuesday, the GM (Finance), Vivek Tripathi, said the QIP was expected this fiscal.
After this, the Centre’s stake may come down to around 69-70 per cent from the existing 76 per cent. He did not elaborate further on the fund raising plans.
On May 25, the HCL board cleared a proposal to enhance the borrowing limit to ₹1,500 crore from the existing ₹800 crore.
Exploration permission
According to Chairman and Managing Director, Santosh Sharma, the company plans to monetise waste-rock reserves, enter exploration as an independent agency and set up copper ore tailing plants for extraction of gold and silver.
As part of the waste rock monetisation plan, the company will sell over-burden material, extracted during copper ore mining, to meet the Railway’s ballast requirement.
HCL has ₹1,000 crore worth of such reserves.
The company recently received the licence to operate as an independent exploration agency.
Ideally, it should help HCL to take up exploration job for others.
Sharma said construction of ₹200 crore copper ore tailing plant for extraction of gold and silver at Malanjkhand in Madhya Pradesh will be completed by July.
The company is also focussed to enhance its copper mining potential.
A ₹408-crore exploration contract is also under way to carry out fresh drillings in Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand.
Sharma believes the closure of Sterlite’s copper plant at Thoothukudi (Tamil Nadu) has come as an opportunity to HCL.
The company has an installed smelter capacity of 70,000 tonnes in Jharkhand and Gujarat.
The capacity will be escalated to one lakh tonne as the company will bring on stream its closed smelter unit at Khetri (Rajasthan) later this year.
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