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The shares of mining major Vedanta Limited declined more than 4 per cent on Wednesday, a day after the company reported its quarterly earnings.

According to Vedanta Group Chief Executive Officer Srinivas Venkatakrishnan, the results are positive in terms of all the verticals. "We had a strong Q4 compared to Q3 and production across all key commodities, zinc and silver, went up in Q4," he said.

The company posted a net profit of Rs. 2,615 crore for the quarter ended March 31, as against Rs. 4,802 crore for the corresponding period a year ago.

The share price opened at Rs. 160.50 apiece on Wednesday, lower than Tuesday's close of Rs. 163.50. It declined to as much as Rs. 156.80 apiece on the National Stock Exchange in early trade.

Venkatakrishnan is upbeat about the mark-to-market gain from the company's investment in Anglo American PLC. “ We did say that it was going to yield a much better return and this quarters' numbers have shown that it has materialised. These two tranches of the structured investment mature in April 2020 and October 2020. There are downside protections at certain pre-determined levels, and at that stage, the listed entity is fully protected ,” he says.

According to Arun Kumar GR, Group CFO and Director, the firm's net debt to EBITDA continues to be 1:1. It has been around one for the last six quarters, which denotes a strong balance sheet.

"This partly goes back to the observation that I had earlier that we actually had a sequential excellent quarter. When we ended Q3, we did mentioned that a lot of our working capital investments will pullback and most of the capex we spent in Q3, we already spent on oil etc. for the year, and hence we had a high level of free cash flows. We had flagged off in Q3 that we will have an excellent cash in Q4,” Venkatakrishnan noted.