With banks racing against time to clean up their
balance-sheets by March 2017, a heavily indebted India Inc has been
forced to go on a fire sale of its assets.
Since
January, assets worth ₹1.50 lakh crore have been sold or are being put
on the block. Essar and Reliance Group lead the pack with recently
announced plans to monetise assets worth ₹85,000 crore and ₹11,000 crore
respectively; others, including GMR and Jaypee Group, are being forced
to sell profitable businesses to pare debt.
Market
watchers say this could be the best news in years for the banking
sector, reeling under rising non-performing assets. “Large corporates
resisted sale of non-core assets on the pretext that they can extract
more value tomorrow than today,” a top public sector bank official said.
“But with banks refusing further financing till
loans are repaid or more equity is brought in by the promoters, the
corporates have got the message,” the official added.
Banks
have been scrambling to improve their bad debt position since the RBI
under former Governor Raghuram Rajan issued a diktat to clean up their
balance-sheets by March 2017.
In turn, banks began to push corporates to
pare thedebt they had piled up over 5-10 years.
No comments:
Post a Comment