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Tata Motors quarterly profit falls 34 percent
By ERIKA KINETZ,AP Business Writer AP - Saturday, November 1
MUMBAI, India - India's largest automaker, Tata Motors Ltd., said Friday that its net profit in the July-September quarter fell 34.1 percent from a year earlier to 3.47 billion rupees ($70.1 million) due to slowing vehicle sales and foreign currency losses.
Revenues rose 6.1 percent from the year-earlier quarter to 70.78 billion rupees ($1.43 billion).
"The situation continues to be challenging," managing director Ravi Kant said.
"We think going forward something should improve. By when and how much it's difficult to say, in the current context of uncertainty in the marketplace," he added.
The rupee has slid precipitously against the dollar, damaging earnings at many of India's blue-chip companies. Before taxes and a 2.85 billion rupee ($57.6 million) foreign exchange loss, quarterly profits rose 8.9 percent over last year to 6.43 billion rupees ($129.8 million), the company said.
Tight consumer finance, which the company has been able to partly mitigate through its in-house financing arm, and high commodity prices also hurt earnings, officials said.
Vehicle sales for the quarter declined 1.1 percent from a year earlier to 135,037.
The company turned to capital markets to refinance a $3 billion bridge loan for its June acquisition of Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford Motor Co. just as the financial crisis hit, causing the company further pain.
In an effort to repay part of that loan, which is due in June 2009, Tata offered its Indian shareholders the option of buying 42 billion rupees ($848 million) worth of additional stock between Sept. 29 and Oct. 20.
But the company's stock got swept up in the punishing sell-off of Indian equities, and traded at a lower price on the Bombay Stock Exchange than the rights offering for much of the offer period.
Tata chief financial officer C. Ramakrishnan said the parent Tata Group and the underwriter of that deal, JM Financial, picked up about 80 percent of the offering.
He added that plans to raise an additional $600 million on international equity markets would have to be reconsidered.
Kant said the company would focus on cost reductions and continue to push domestic sales as car sales in developed markets slow. Tata also launched operations in Poland last month.
Exports fell to 135,037 vehicles last quarter from 136,573 in the year-earlier period, largely because sales in South Africa, one of the company's largest export markets, plunged by about a third as credit tightened, company officials said.
Sales of Jaguar and Land Rover vehicles fell 11 percent to 61,421. Strong sales in Russia, the third largest global market for Land Rover, and China, the fifth largest market for the two brands, helped stem the slide.
The company's high-profile "people's car," the Nano _ which at 100,000 rupees ($2,028) is billed as the world's cheapest car _ also hit hard times.
Violent farmer protests forced the company to relocate its $350 million Nano factory from West Bengal to the business-friendly state of Gujarat earlier this month, costing time and money.
Officials said they still aim for a modest launch by year's end using existing factories, but that it will take 6 months to a year to ramp up production to the full 250,000-vehicle capacity at the new location.
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