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Reliance Q4 profit jumps as product prices rise


BOMBAY (Reuters) - Reliance Industries, India's largest petrochemicals maker and a leading refiner, said on Thursday its quarterly profit jumped a better-than-expected 28 percent on growing demand and slowing capacity expansion in the two sectors.

But Reliance shares, weighed down in a bearish Indian market, fell 1.7 percent to the day's low of 531.1 rupees after the results were announced.

The flagship of the powerful Reliance group, India's biggest conglomerate by sales, reported a net profit of 14.19 billion rupees for its fourth quarter ended March 31, up from 11.01 billion rupees a year earlier.

The median forecast was 13.37 billion rupees in a Reuters poll of 10 analysts.

It reported a total income of 145.85 billion rupees, up 11 percent from 130.81 billion rupees a year earlier.

"The topline is slightly higher than our forecast. Reliance continues to be a big beneficiary of the upswing in petrochemical prices," said Jigar Shah, head of research at local brokerage K.R. Choksey.

"Given the strong demand for oil products, the core business will still be the growth driver."

The shares, which have the highest weighting in India's key index, have already lost 5.7 percent in 2004 through Wednesday's close, while the index has dropped two percent.

Founded by the late Dhirubhai Ambani in 1958 to trade synthetic yarn, Reliance Industries has grown into a fully integrated energy behemoth that is India's largest private-sector company by sales.

It became a virtual monopoly in the domestic petrochemicals sector after it acquired its main rival, state-run Indian Petrochemicals Corporation Ltd, over two years ago, while its 620,000 barrels-a-day refinery processes about a quarter of India's annual requirements.

Reliance is set to become a key player in oil and gas exploration, with rights to more than 35 blocks. In 2002, it discovered an estimated 14.5 trillion cubic feet (410.6 billion cubic metres) of gas, India's largest such find in decades.

The company, India's sole private refiner, also plans to retail petrol and diesel and has a licence to set up more than 5,800 gas stations.

Reliance Industries and other group companies together own a 51 percent stake in Reliance Energy Ltd, a leading private-sector utility that plans to build what it says will be the world's largest gas-fired power plant, with a capacity of 3,800 megawatts.

It made an aggressive entry into telecoms through Reliance Infocomm, a 45 percent subsidiary, in December 2002.

The company, which provides mobile phone services based on CDMA (code division multiple access) technology, now has nearly 6.5 million customers and is neck and neck with GSM (global system for mobile communications) rival Bharti Tele-Ventures for the top slot in the booming sector.

Reliance expects to launch fixed-line and broadband services for the enterprise segment within a month.

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