RBI’s surprise 50 basis points interest rate hike this week was met with dismay by consumers and India Inc. But while big companies and car/home buyers get all the headlines, the sharpest impact of the ultra hard monetary policy is felt by the relatively smaller companies. They expanded capacities in the past two years — now many are grappling with underutilisation of plant as consumer demand turns sluggish in many sectors. Investments are on hold, some have imposed hiring freeze and operational costs are being trimmed. Being small, not many have the size and access to cheaper foreign currency funds. The following stories from five firms with turnovers ranging from 186 crore to 2,881 crore, give an idea of the entrepreneurial battles being fought as the cost of capital rises. We have a foreign currency loan $100 million, used to fund our Sylvannia buy in 2007. We take short-term loans ( 50-200 crore) to fund our working capital needs. There is no problem with our foreign currency loan. May be when we refinance it next year it might get a bit expensive but not like what it is in India. Our distributors and dealers are experiencing a rise in cost in their working capital. So to help them we have taken compensatory measures – we typically give them a cash discount of 2% but early this year we have increased it to 2.5%. This would have dented our bottomline by around 15 crore. But for us the bigger worry is that interest rate hike has impacted construction activities which in turn is affecting demands for our goods. We are pushing for internal efficiency. Today we maintain a 60-day inventory of about 400 crore. We want to reduce it to around 52 days this year. Most of us increased our capacities in the past few years. We doubled our capacity in the past three years. Our plants are operating at a suboptimal levels. We are setting up a 500-crore plant near Bhiwadi for which we need to take a bank loan. Also, our working capital (typically under 50 crore) is financed through short-term loans. We had tied up our 300-crore loan at a fixed rate of 9.5-10% beforehand. Hence, our project cost hasn’t gone up. If I had to go the market to tie up funds today, the interest rate cost would have gone up by 2-3% higher. But our working capital cost has gone up by 1.5-2% . The direct impact of interest rate hike is not much. If I had to take a fresh loan perhaps it would have hurt. But its the impact of interest rate hike on consumer demand that worries us. So far we were busy managing growth. Now the focus has shifted to managing costs. We are looking at low-cost automation like pick-and-place robots for low skilled jobs. But my biggest worry is slowing demand and government’s lack of concern for the manufacturing industry. Not a single announcement has been made which makes me feel good.
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