Had largest ever real estate sale at Rs 1500 cr: Adi Godrej

Adi Godrej, Chairman at Godrej Industries, spoke about the key growth drivers for the second quarter. He says all businesses did particularly well, especially Godrej Properties — its performance exceeded the entire previous year on topline. Below is the verbatim transcript of Adi Godrej’s interview with Priya Sheth on CNBC-TV18.Q: What are the key growth drivers for this quarter?A: All our businesses did well particularly Godrej Properties. Godrej Properties had a stellar quarter, the best ever. In the first half, Godrej Properties performance exceeded the entire previous year on the topline. We had the largest-ever real estate single sale in the history of the country at almost Rs 1,500 crore and that together with number of completions of residential property, etc., helped Godrej Properties do very well. However, our other businesses also did well. In Godrej Agrovet we announced the acquisition of a listed company called Astec LifeSciences which will be very synergistic with Godrej Agrovet and that will add a lot of value in the quarters to come. Our other businesses, Godrej Consumer Products, our chemicals business, all performed well. Q: Godrej Agrovet has faced some headwinds this quarter. Do you think the next quarter will also be slightly tough for Agrovet? A: That depends on how the agricultural situation develops. The kharif situation was bad because of the poor monsoon. Hopefully rabi could be much better so that could help improve things. It is very difficult to predict at this stage but it will depend on how the agricultural situation pans out. We have a lot of innovative new products, new ideas, etc being implemented in Godrej Agrovet. We have an acquisition which will be consolidated from November onwards. So, overall we expect good performance in Godrej Agrovet in the coming quarters. Q: Speaking about acquisitions, you have made one acquisition in Agrovet but among your other companies how often are you going to see acquisitions in this coming half? A: We announced in Godrej Consumer Products also an acquisition in South Africa. We have also increased our equity stake in our Chilean subsidiary from 60 percent to 100 percent. We are looking at other acquisition possibilities so over the next quarters we think there will be some inorganic growth in the group.  Q: Also wanted to speak to you about the Bihar elections. What is the kind of impact do you think it will have on industry going forward? A: It is very difficult to tell but I do hope that government will be even more reform oriented, a lot of administratively done without going to parliament reforms can be put in place. So, I am looking forward to the government continuing on its reforms path.