Suzlon Energy – No Wind Under Its Shares!

India is the fourth largest wind market in the world and is aggressively expanding its renewable energy portfolio. The country is looking at increasing its base to 500 GW of RE capacity by 2030, which is expected to come to a large extent, from Wind Energy. The center has announced bids for 8 GW of wind power annually till 2030. India’s installed wind capacity reached 42 GW as of December’2022 and wind accounted for 10.2% of the total installed power capacity.

Now, Suzlon which ranks amongst the largest wind turbine makers in the world has failed to pocket this growth story currently. The company has a presence across 17 countries and an extensive range of wind turbines suitable for a wide range of locations. Suzlon has installed over 12,500 wind turbines across six continents and has 14 manufacturing units in India. The company is a vertically integrated wind turbine manufacturer in India and presently has 13,000 MW of wind assets including wind farms across nine states. Watch the full video here:

Then why has the company remained unsuccessful in translating this success into numbers? Suzlon has a very low promoter holding of 14%, of which 80% is pledged. Moreover, promoter holdings have declined by 5% in the last three years. The company has had poor sales growth of -5% CAGR over the previous five years. Shares are currently trading around Rs.8 which is 1/50th of the Rs.800 levels reached in 2008. Stock performance has been very dismal and does not look like can reward shareholders in the future too. The company looks fundamentally bad with a negative book value.

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The main reason for the company’s downturn is its vast debt balance, high working capital requirement,  intense competition – both domestically and internationally, and failure to advance technology and diversify into solar or hydrogen technologies, etc. Suzlon suffered badly during the global financial crisis as competition in the wind turbine industry increased with the rise of Chinese players. Like other large business houses with global ambitions, Suzlon too went into an acquisition frenzy and took a lot of debt to buy foreign companies. Since then the company has been engaging in several debt restructuring programs as well as refinancing exercises to get back in shape. However, I think Suzlon might have missed the bus to the fast-paced energy transition route that currently India is taking on.