ReNew Energy Global plc

Thank you for standing by and welcome to the Renew Q2 2025 Earnings Report. All participants are in 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 Ernest Shahi. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. We did put out a press release announcing results for fiscal 2025 second quarter, ended September 30th, 2024 last night. And a copy of the press release and the earnings presentation are available in the investor relations section on Renew's website at www.renew.com. With me today are Suman Sinha, our founder, chairman, and CEO, Kailash Vaswani, our CFO, and Vaishali Nigam-Sinha, co-founder and chairperson, sustainability. After the prepared remarks, which we expect will take about half an hour, we will open the call for questions. Please note, our Safe Harbor statements are contained within our press release, presentation materials, and materials 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 such forward-looking statements. So we encourage you to review the press release we furnish in our Form 6-K 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 reconciled to the most comparable IFRS measures And these reconciliations are also available on our website in the best release, presentation materials, and our annual report. It's now my pleasure to hand it over to Sumanth, who recently featured in Time's list of 100 Most Influential Leaders Driving Business Climate Action. Over to you, Sumanth.

Yeah, thank you, Anand. Good morning, everyone. Good evening or good afternoon. I'm glad to have all of you on our earnings call. Before we get into our business, let me take note of extreme weather changes that we continue to see globally, underlining the urgent need to deliver sustainable sources of clean energy. From forest fires in the US to flash floods in Europe or the soaring AQI levels in northern India, which we are currently experiencing, we see more events that indicate that climate change is for real. Renew, of course, is doing its bit to fight this enormous challenge by changing the energy mix of India, the most populous country on the planet, with a growing energy demand and no alternative sources to fill the demand supply gap. Having said that, let me now turn to updates from our business. I am glad to inform our investors that we are on track to deliver the megawatts and accretive growth for the current fiscal year, along with expanding our contracted pipelines. we continue to strive towards reducing costs and building efficiency in our operations. Among all our peers, we have commissioned the most renewable energy megawatts in India in the first six months of this fiscal year. While our share price movement has been affected by U.S. macro factors, these factors actually have little or no bearing on our own business or growth or profitability as all of our business and operations are linked to the Indian economy that is in fact expected to grow at more than 7% this fiscal year. Turning to highlights for the quarter, we have commissioned 860 megawatts to date in this fiscal year and are on track to meet our guidance of installed megawatts. In addition to the 860 megawatts commissioned so far, there are another 350 to 400 megawatts that are currently installed, which should be largely commissioned in the third quarter. Our total operating capacity net of assets that we sold in the last fiscal year grew by approximately 30%. Our total portfolio in absolute terms grew by about 18% and would have been an even higher 21% after adjusting for the 400 megawatts that we sold last year. Including the approximately 700 megawatts capacity signed in October of this year, we have been able to sign PPAs for 2.9 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity in the current fiscal year, extending thereby our current portfolio from 13.8 gigawatts in September 24 to 16.3 gigawatts. That does not include 900 megawatt hours of battery storage capacity that are part of our complex projects. So just to say again, our current portfolio is 16.3 gigawatts of contracted capacity, including to that, another 900 megawatts of battery storage capacity, which is in addition to that. Turning to our financial performance, we reported a 14% growth in our adjusted EBITDA this quarter, driven by cost optimization. In addition, we had a 31% increase in profit after tax, primarily on account of lower G&A and lower finance costs. And Kailash will cover this in detail in the finance section. Our 6.4 gigawatt solar module manufacturing facilities are now fully operational. I am delighted to announce that recently our cell facility has started trial production of cells as well. While it is expected to take the rest of the fiscal year to stabilize cell operations, we expect that our entire cell and module facilities will be stabilized fully and will be operating for the full next fiscal year. In addition, We have now secured an external order book of over 900 megawatts, ensuring that our surplus capacity is sold in the market. Additionally, we are also listed as a Bloomberg Tier 1 supplier, underlining the quality that we have been able to create. Turning to page eight, we are committed to creating shareholder value, of course. Over the years, we have built a sustainable competitive advantage in one of the fastest growing markets globally, by raising capital to the cheapest source. We have grown responsibly, demonstrating capital discipline and taking up projects where returns are significantly above the cost of capital. Not only this, we have also created a platform with in-house manufacturing, EPC and O&M, bundled with our own digitization and data analytics. We are the leaders in complex solutions and one of the very few Indian IPPs to have commission over 2 gigawatts of renewable energy assets in a single year. Turning to page 9, we continue to be one of the leaders in terms of megawatts commissioned since Q3 of FI24, as we have commissioned 2.4 gigawatts, or about 25% of our portfolio, in this period of the last 12 months. Our operating megawatts have increased by around 30% after adjusting for asset sales that we did in the last 12 months. Fiscal year to date, we have done around 860 megawatts of commissioning, ensuring that we are on track to hit our megawatt target for the year. In addition, we also have about 350 megawatts of solar projects that are currently installed and are in the process of getting connected to the grid. We expect that the peak power project should also be fully commissioned this quarter, and so will the RTC wind phase two. We'll also start getting commissioned later this quarter. While our peers in the market have faced connectivity and supply chain issues, our strategy has ensured that we have not only secured interconnection approvals for our current bid wins, but also beyond that. That is for our bid wins, not just for the contracted capacity. Our in-house EPC teams have ensured that supply chain bottlenecks are sorted out and there is no shortage of materials for wind or solar sites. Additionally, we continue to demonstrate capital discipline as the auction markets continue to evolve at a rapid pace. As stated earlier, we don't target market share, but are focused on delivering returns above our cost of capital, targeting levered returns of 16 to 20%. And we have won around 1.4 gigawatts of additional capacity so far this fiscal year, where the expected returns have met our thresholds. Do note that while there are still over six gigawatts of bid wins with letters of award beyond our current portfolio that won't be included into our portfolio until the PP is signed, we are basing our construction principally around interconnection infrastructure availability. Turning to page 10, let me turn to updates from our manufacturing facilities. Getting into manufacturing was a strategic move to secure our supply chain. as India was moving to restrict imports of solar modules into India. This barrier meant that we needed to build our own facilities. The results are visible in the commissioning that we have been able to do in the last 12 months or so using our own solar modules. While the two module plants are fully ramped up, I'm happy to announce that our cell plant in Gujarat has also started trial production. Our plants are now featured in the Bloomberg Tier 1 module supplier list as well as a PVEL top performer 2024. Our external order book now stands at over 900 megawatts and is likely to grow and contribute to consolidated EBITDA. We will be able to provide more granularity on the FI26 projected numbers along with our FI25 results next year. In addition to securing supply, we are also looking to de-risk our capital by finding partners for the manufacturing business. Let me now hand it over to Kailash to talk more about the financial updates. Kailash, over to you.