Capex programme on track, co spent half of Rs 6K cr: CONCOR

DFC will be fully operational by 2019, she added. Below is the verbatim transcript of P Alli Rani's interview with Latha Venkatesh & Sonia Shenoy on CNBC-TV18. Sonia: There were lot of announcements that came in the Rail Budget this time for the sector as a whole but how much could your own company benefit from all of that in the year to come? A: The Rail Budget had good news for the container rail operators. Container Corporation of India (CONCOR) definitely stands to benefit a lot. It was a very pleasant surprise that Indian railways have decided to restore some goods to container movement which were denied four-five years back. So that is a big boost for domestic business and that will show in volume for us. However, regarding infrastructure and rail tariff - that is the kind of support which we get from Indian railways and it has also been very positive. Latha: I wanted to ask you more about the performance in Q4 vis-à-vis Q3. Q3 was a disappointment in terms of volume, there was a decline in volume considerably. How much was Q4 better than Q3 and better than year ago in terms of volumes? A: It is little early to talk about Q4 but I would say that if you look at the market, exports have been down. It is important that export regain for us because the important factor in financials is cost for empty running, so we had to restrict some of our volumes because we didn't want to incur too much of a cost because our margins were getting squeezed; our margins had been under pressure for a long time now, so we had to be more rationalise than we had to run trains. Therefore, we are hoping that with so many announcements from the finance Budget towards exports, focusing on exports, we are hopeful that exports would be picking up maybe in the Q1 of the next year. So that would definitely bring back volumes. Latha: That is still an area of uncertainty given global growth. We are at the last day of the current quarter; you will have some idea whether the amounts of empty trains were lesser in Q4 than Q3 or were they as much as in Q3? A: It was flat. It was same kind of empty running we did. It was not an improvement; we couldn\\'t improve because exports were down. So, I wouldn\\'t say that we have seen signs of export pickup already. Sonia: You had earlier identified an amount of Rs 6,000 crore that you would spend as capex till the year 2018. Can you tell us how of that has spent already and because of slight amount of slowdown that we have seen overall, will you reduce your capex spends? A: Not at all. More than half of that amount has been spent in the three years of five year plan. We plan to spend the remaining in the next two years. Our capex programme has been very much on track. These are all investments in long-term facilities which would give long-term returns. We cannot cut back on that especially as you said at the beginning with the dedicated freight corridor (DFC) coming, this is supplementary infrastructure for the DFC which has to be in place when the DFC comes otherwise the DFC utilisation could be a problem. These terminal infrastructures on which we have been focusing and going ahead and even we have enhanced it through over the last three years though the total money outflow has been the same, we manage to bring in more projects and we are on track on that. So there is no second thought that we need those entire infrastructures in place before the DFC starts operation. Latha: What is the extent of completion or progress and what is the timeline that you are looking at or you have been told? A: DFC is not only focused for us, it's focused for the export-import (EXIM) sector and it is focused for the industry. Infrastructure is so important to the country that a lot of people focusing on that and the best thing is even at the Prime Minister's level this infrastructure has been monitored and railway minister has also given a top priority and I feel that in 2019, we would see it fully operational. I am very optimistic about DFC because the economic gains are so much to the country. You have recently heard reports from the DFC which said that they have brought in more equipment to ensure that the daily progress is more than what it used to be. So I am very positive that by 2019 we will be seeing trains running on this.