ReNew Energy Global plc

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Renew Power second quarter 2023 earnings conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, you will need to press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Nathan Judge. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone, and thank you very much for joining us today. On Tuesday evening, the company issued a press release announcing results for its fiscal second quarter 2023, ended September 30, 2022. A copy of the press release and the presentation are available on the investor relations section of Renew's website at www.renewpaddler.in. With me today are Sumanth Sinha, founder, chairman, and CEO, Kadar Apadje, CFO, and Vaishali Nigam Sinha, Chief Sustainability Officer. Samant will start the call by going through an overview of the company and recent key highlights. Kadar will then go through the results, followed by an update on ESG from Vaishali. And then we will wrap up the call with Samant discussing our guidance for fiscal year 2023. After this, we will open up the call for questions. Please note our safe harbor statements are contained within our press release, presentation materials, and available on our website. These statements are important and integral to all our remarks. There are risks and uncertainties that could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by forward-looking statements. So we encourage you to review the press release we furnished in our Form 6-K and presentation on our website for a more complete description. Also contained in our press release, presentation materials, and annual report are certain non-IFRS measures that we reconciled to the most comparable IFRS measures. And these reconciliations are also available on our website in the press release, presentation materials, and annual report. It is now my pleasure to hand it over to Samant.

Yes, thank you, Nathan, and good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, everybody, depending on where you are. Let me dive right into the presentation itself. Starting on page four of the presentation, our core operations fundamentally remain on track, and through the first half of fiscal year 2023, we are in line with our internal targets, excluding the contribution from the 528 megawatt acquisition, which is in process. For the first half of the year, revenues and EBITDA grew more than 20% year on year, in line with robust expansion in our commission capacities, bringing the total to 7.7 gigawatts of operating capacity. The total capacity under construction currently is 5.7 gigawatts, which is targeted to be operational by end of the next fiscal year, and that brings our total portfolio size to 13.4 gigawatts currently. Our revenues from customers rose 28% year-on-year in the first half of fiscal 2023, and cash flow to equity increased by 48% in H1 from last year due to higher revenues from operating capacities and improving DSOs. We are making good progress on our accounts receivables and are seeing regular payments coming in from the state distribution companies, that have the highest amount of overdues. And Kedar will cover this in greater detail in his section. On to signing of new PPAs on page five. We signed one gigawatt of new PPAs this quarter, and we have also de-risked our growth as only less than 1.5% of our 13.4 gigawatt portfolio now has pending PPAs. That's less than 1.5%. The corporate PPA portfolio itself grew 41% from Q1 and is now at 1.5 gigawatts, almost 247% higher than the prior year, with many additional conversations occurring right now, which we would hope to convert to firm PPAs in the coming months. We have signed more than 400 megawatts of corporate PPAs in the quarter ended September 30th, and our customers include well-known companies such as Amazon, Suzuki, Mahindra, and Toyota. And we believe that this shows a differentiated advantage in this business segment. Corporate PPS offer higher returns than plain Mandela renewable energy projects, given higher barriers of entry, our ability to partner with corporate customers, and provide them energy sooner than our competitors are able to. We are currently having discussions with many corporate customers And we do believe that Renew will have a four to five gigawatt corporate PPA portfolio by 2025. Overall, the growth environment remains bullish as renewables continue to be the lowest cost option for new power capacity in India. And this can be seen on page six. Increasingly, our customers are seeking complex power solutions that can be delivered consistently over the full year and we have built this expertise by offering a full suite of renewable products overlaid with digitalization and a proprietary AI technology. We believe this is a truly differentiated offering in the renewable sector. Given the need for electricity to be delivered around the clock, we have seen increased interest in our intelligent energy solutions. We expect that over 5 gigawatts of auctions for complex projects will occur over the next several months. with another eight gigawatts under discussion at SECI. And there is over 100 gigawatt opportunity by 2030. Now keep in mind very importantly that one megawatt of RTC power actually requires more than three megawatts of renewable energy power. The addition of 3E, which I'll talk about, provides even greater differentiation to our offerings. Our operational expertise across the renewable energy technologies combined with a leading digital platform provides us capabilities that few have, and this can be seen in how few bidders are participating in the complex RE solution auction relative to the plain Manila projects. This continues to present opportunities for higher than average returns, and our most recent 300 megawatt hybrid win is evidence of this. In this context, I will now speak more about our new growth initiatives. We have signed definitive agreements to acquire shares of 3E, which is a leading European SaaS platform that enhances renewable energy asset performance through analytics and AI. The transaction should be completed in two stages of 40% now and 40% in 2024. 3E currently already has about 20 gigawatts of assets under management. As we see the energy complex today, efficiencies through digitization will be key to continued differentiation and higher returns as IPPs increasingly require customized products. We have tremendous confidence in the company and have been using three state-of-the-art software for our own assets for the last four years. The three platforms, along with our internally developed digital capabilities, built over the years of experience, we believe will make 3E a worldwide leader in asset performance management for solar, wind, and storage assets. There are many global opportunities for this digital platform that can enhance our returns for the incremental capital that we are putting into this investment. We continue to pursue enhancing the returns on your capital that we deploy through capital recycling. We have recently entered into a partnership with Norfund, the Norwegian government's investment fund for developing countries, and with KLP, Norway's largest pension company, to co-invest in our transmission projects, and they have signed definitive agreements to invest in the very first project. Our investment in transmission projects is synergistic to our renewable energy project development and further enables higher returns from our core renewable energy business. As we have built over 6,800 kilometers of transmission lines already over the past decade, long-distance transmission is a natural extension of our core capabilities. By taking on the execution of transmission lines that connect with our own RE projects, we are able to bring on these renewable energy projects sooner with greater predictability and allow us opportunities to capture additional revenues from our renewable energy projects in the power markets. On our initiatives on green hydrogen, you may have seen our yesterday's announcement on the signing of a framework agreement with the government of Egypt to set up a green hydrogen plant in the Suez Canal Economic Zone. As per the agreement, a final investment decision will be made over the next 12 to 18 months. This project is scheduled to be implemented in phases, the first of which is a pilot phase to produce 20,000 tons of green hydrogen, along with derivatives annually. In the next phase, the production of 200,000 tons per year of green hydrogen, along with derivatives, will be achieved, thereby bringing the project's total green hydrogen production capacity to 220,000 tons per year. One risk that we are frequently asked about is inflation risk to CAPEX, as well as security of supply, which is discussed on page seven. We believe that we have managed this well and there is limited risk to our CAPEX budget at this point. We have locked in turbine prices, so there is essentially no material exposure on this front. We continue to build module and cell manufacturing facilities that ensure supply at an advantage cost relative to imports for future growth. Even if module prices were to rise by 10% from today's level, our CAPEX would only change by about 3% to 4%. As most of our wind turbine prices are locked in, there is essentially no material exposure on this front. We continue to expect that on new projects, we will deliver project level equity IRRs within our targeted range of 16 to 20%. If in the event that any additional new project has an expected IRR below our minimum thresholds, we will simply not proceed. We will remain disciplined with your capital. With that, I would like to turn it over to Kedar to go over the latest quarters financials. Kedar, over to you.