MRPL to declares 12 per cent dividend

Mangalore, Aug 2 (UNI) Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Limited (MRPL) Board of Directors today approved payment of 12 per cent dividend for the year ended March 31-2008 against Eight per cent paid last year.

A decision to this effect was taken at the 20th Annual General Meeting (AGM) of shareholders of MRPL, a subsidiary of ONGC, here.

Announcing this at a press conference after chairing the AGM, MRPL Chairman R S Sharma said that the company had achieved an excellent performance on financial parameters during 2007-08 and also during the Q1 of 2008-09.

The company had achieved a turnover at Rs 37339,12 crore, up 16 per cent from Rs 32208,13 crore previous year. The company had earned a net profit of Rs 1272.23 crore as compared to Rs 525.52 crore in the previous year.

He said during the first quarter of the current year, the company had a turnover of Rs 10,747 crore up by 46 per cent as compared to Rs 7376 crore during the corresponding period last year. The net profit of the company after tax for the quarter stood at Rs 845 crore as against last year's net profit for the same period of Rs 368 crore. This was mainly because of inventory gain of Rs 655 crore net of tax on account of increase in average crude oil price from March to June this year. Export during the quarter was Rs 2852 crore as compared to Rs 2911 crore for the corresponding previous quarter, he added.

Mr Sharma said that the Phase III expansion and upgradation project of the MRPL envisaging increased capacity of crude thruput from 9.69 MMTPA to 15 MMTPA, addition of secondary processing unit for increasing the distillate yield by about 10 per cent capacity to process high TAN crude was expected to be completed by the end of 2011all the agreements have been signed with the licensors after obtaining approval from government department. Tenders have been awarded. The land acquisition work was almost completed for the project which required 400 acres of land. The project including the phase III would cover a total land of 18,000 acres including for colony and roads, he said. Though the cost of the phase III project was initially estimated at Rs. 7943 crore would now required substantially higher outlay due to various factors which was yet to be worked out.

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