A major overhang has been lifted for Sterlite Technologies as promoters have released their entire pledge. Anupam Jindal, group CFO of the company, spoke at length about the same.

“We have been consistently delivering historical performance with CAGR of more than 30 percent in revenue growth. Therefore, the current pricing scenario which we see, the long-term growth drivers if we see, the data continues to have exponential growth, 5G will be another enabler in that and this will be a 5-7 year growth driver and fiber in 5G will be a major player,” Jindal said on Tuesday.

On the business front, he said, “We continue to play a major role in enhanced fibre. For us, the last few months of developments are not serious in terms of performance of the company because those kinds of things would have happened in the past also and I would say that Sterlite is not affected in a significant manner. We see bottoming out of that situation because in China the 5G spectrum has been allocated to large operators and we are going to see the implementation of that starting soon, not just in China but globally also large operators are preparing for 5G capex in a major way. Therefore, we will have major traction coming in from our new solutions which we are offering to them."

Talking about the pledged share, Jindal said, “We had communicated earlier that promoters pledged the shareholding in the company in September 2018 to delist Vedanta Resources PLC from London Stock Exchange and Sterlite Technologies’ shares were pledged as part of overall security arrangement they had to give to the lenders.”

On the debt front, he said, “The pledge and the debt of the company didn’t have any correlation because pledge was done by the promoters for personal requirement, nothing to do with the operations of the company.”

“The debt is at Rs 1,700 crore as of March end and it’s at a comfortable level, well below one debt equity and less than 2 times of debt to EBITDA and given the phase we are in, we continue to invest in growth of the company through capex and other measures,” added Jindal.