ReNew Energy Global plc

Thank you for standing by and welcome to the Renew Power fourth quarter FY23 earnings call. All participants are 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, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Darcy, and good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. On Tuesday evening, the company issued a press release announcing results for its fiscal fourth quarter ending March 31, 2023. A copy of the press release and the presentation are available on the Investors Relations section of Renew's website at www.renew.com. With me today are Simant Sinha, founder, chairman, and CEO, and Kedar Appadjie, CFO. After the prepared remarks, we will open up the call for questions. Please note, our safe harbor statements are contained within our press release and presentation materials and materials available on our website. These statements are important and integral to all our remarks, And there are risks and uncertainties that could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. So we encourage you to review the press release we have furnished in our form 6K and the 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 reconcile 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.

Thank you, Nathan. Good morning, good evening, good afternoon to everybody on the call. I'm glad to have you join us on this, on Renews Q4 FI23 earnings call. At the beginning, I thought it would be good to start with three key thoughts. Firstly, the Indian renewable energy market is getting stronger and has seen very encouraging developments recently. The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, which is tasked with the renewable energy sector in India, has increased the pace of auctions by threefold to 50 gigawatts for FI24 and onwards just from this April onwards. More importantly, the majority of this increase is expected across complex and wind auctions where we have proven strong comparative advantages. In fact, in the first few of these auctions, we have good news to report in terms of a complex bid one with quite a healthy IRR. We will obviously talk more about this and other select corporate and state-level bids one once we find the PPAs. We're also pleased to announce that we have entered into a joint venture with Petronas' renewable energy subsidiary, Gentari, on our peak power project. As you know, we view capital recycling as a pillar to enhancing shareholder value. In addition to these positives, there are a number of steps taken by regulators to ease doing business for players like us, including the successful continuity of the late payment surcharge scheme which has substantially improved our DSOs to 138 days as of March 31. All these and other developments indeed give us strength to build our growth trajectory in this market. Secondly, Renew, as you know, will complete two years of being listed on the NASDAQ in the next couple of months. And in this period, we have built up our organizational footprint and capabilities across key areas to respond to the global climate transition opportunity. We have developed strong talent bench strength by onboarding several key leaders in key functions of project execution, regulatory, business development, digital, and solar manufacturing, apart from four additions on our highest level management committee with leaders from diverse global backgrounds. There have been multiple steps taken by us to enhance our readiness for the future. As an example, we are seeing good momentum on our solar manufacturing operation to provide critical supply security and cost advantages to our core renewable energy development business. During this period, we have also bolstered our own wind EPC capabilities to deliver projects at scale. We continue to engage with stakeholders and have seen good traction in our sustainability ratings. As you are also aware, our largest investor, CPPIB, has increased their economic stake to 52% in the company. All these important milestones certainly position us as a stronger climate transition leader. Thirdly, on page six, we continue to execute well on the other important building block of financing. During FI23, in a difficult debt environment, we successfully refinanced more than $1 billion of maturities by reducing the interest cost in favor of rupee-based loans. As mentioned earlier, we have signed a JV agreement with Petronas, who is keen to enhance their presence in renewables, and we have received the first tranche of their equity contribution for the Peak Power Project. We hope to build on this alliance further. In parallel, we are exploring monetization of our assets that we have. We programmatically intend to execute on asset recycling initiatives as a way to enhance shareholder value. That also enables us to enhance returns, raise funding at higher multiples than our share price implies, which further supports targeted growth at healthy returns without issuing new shares. Turning to page seven, MNRE's recent push to accelerate the annual auction pays to 50 gigawatts, around three times the amount auctioned over the last couple of years each, and a shift towards a higher percentage of complex projects provides significant market opportunities for us. At the same time, we are seeing less competition leading to higher tariffs in recent auctions. Combined with our differentiated ability to execute on complex projects, IRRs in recent auctions that we have won are some of the highest we have seen in the past several years. As a case in point, there was a recent auction for Peak Power Supply where we were one of the biggest winners. While I am conscious that the PPA is yet to be signed, This is a complex project which will require a significant amount of wind capacity to meet the daily dual peak and high PLF delivery requirements. This complexity clearly resulted in much higher tariff bids from our competitors. In fact, out of the 12 bidders, most had final tariffs that were 10 to 20% higher than where we won, which we believe illustrates that we have won. If not, the lowest cost supplier of complex projects in the country. The tariff we realized was about 35% higher than the tariff on our earlier RTC project, and while CAPEX is not expected to be much higher on a normalized basis. Said another way, this project and similar other projects are expected to have IRRs that are above even the high end of our targeted range of IRRs. Put simply, as seen on page eight, Renew has a significant comparative advantage in complex auctions. We are one of the few Indian IPPs with in-house wind EPC, vertically integrated solar execution, and a JV partner with strong credentials for battery storage systems. The proprietary data related to wind gathered over the years, coupled with our digital platforms, takes us to an advantageous position. There is a dearth of EPC and operating capability in India in wind at scale and even less capability to deliver wind, solar, and storage seamlessly. We are happy with the outcome and expect to sign the PPA later this year. Do note that we do not include winds into our portfolio until we sign a PPA. Turning to page nine, we are happy to share that we expect to complete 1.75 to 2.25 gigawatts of execution during financial year 24 and the remaining 3.5 to 4 gigawatts of under construction capacity during FI25. Do note that while execution will be spread throughout the year, a large part of the capacity is expected to come online during the last quarters of the respective fiscal years which limits the profit contribution in the year of commissioning. We have further data stock growth in FY25 since the last time we spoke with you as our two biggest power projects, the round-the-clock and the peak power projects are well advanced in multiple stages and on track to get completed by the end of the current fiscal year. Please also note that there have been cost savings relative to late last year when we would have had to buy modules in order to deliver these projects on the timelines originally discussed. These two projects represent the largest chunk of our 35% plus growth in adjusted EBITDA in FY25. Our manufacturing facility is expected to start production by early next quarter and provide much-needed security of supply, given the supply-side challenges in solar module sourcing in India currently. With that, I would like to turn it over to Kedar, our CFO, to go over the latest financials. Kedar?