Welcome to the ReNew's First Quarter Fiscal Year '24 Earnings Report. There will be a presentation followed by a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Nathan Judge, Head of Investor Relations. Go ahead.

Thank you, Jason, and thank you, everyone. Good morning, and thank you for joining us. On Friday evening, the company issued a press release announcing results for its fiscal first quarter ended June 30, 2023. A copy of the press release and the presentation are available on the Investor Relations section of ReNew's website at www.renew.com. With me today are Sumant Sinha, Founder, Chairman and CEO; Kedar Upadhye, our CFO; and Vaishali Nigam Sinha, Chairman, Sustainability. After the prepared remarks, we will open up the call for questions. Please note, our safe harbor statements are contained within our press release, presentation materials, materials available on our website. These statements are important and integral to all our remarks. There are risks and uncertainties that could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. So we encourage you to review the press release we furnished in our Form 6-K and the presentation on our website for a more complete description. Also contained in our press release, presentation materials, an annual report or certain non-IFRS measures that we reconcile to the most comparable IFRS measures. And these reconciliations are also available on our website, in the press release, presentation materials and on our annual report. It is now my pleasure to hand it over to Sumant.

Yes. Thank you, Nathan. Good morning, everybody. I'm glad to have you all on our Q1 FY '24 earnings call. In a couple of days, we will be committed -- commemorating the second anniversary of our listing on NASDAQ, a significant journey that has been made possible by the support of all of our stakeholders and the dedication of our committed employees. As we approach this milestone, I extend my heartfelt gratitude to all our stakeholders which includes our investors and analysts, our Board members, the domestic and international banking and lending community, our business partners, regulators and government authorities in India and abroad, multiple customers and off-takers whom we have the pleasure of serving, our suppliers and technology providers, global rating agencies, multiple contractors and agencies who make the execution of projects possible on the ground, and of course, our employees who have been instrumental in our achievements thus far. This anniversary provides an opportunity to reflect upon our journey so far. There has been significant growth in the last 2 years. Despite all of the considerable hurdles, including COVID, supply constraints and inflation, our operating portfolio has grown from 5.7 gigawatts to 8.4 gigawatts since Q1 FY '22, an increase of about 47%. Our portfolio grew by over 3 gigawatts during that time. And importantly, we linked all the PPAs on essentially all of our megawatts in our portfolio, thus lowering the offtake risk on our growth outlook considerably compared to 2 years ago. Our trailing 12-month adjusted EBITDA has risen by 41%, and our run rate adjusted EBITDA increased even more or about 60%. In addition, we have improved our DSOs significantly, cutting the time to get paid by more than half from over 260 days to around 114 days. That's 1-1-4. And we believe that there…

Thank you, Sumant. Turning to Page 12. The Indian government remains steadfast in its commitment to establishing robust framework for facilitating the funding of sizable projects at highly competitive interest rates. The timely closing of financing is a critical factor, as you know, in project completion schedule and cost efficiencies. The MOUs for USD 7.8 billion we signed with Power Finance Corporation and Rural Electrification Corporation holds significant importance to us. Not only do they bolster our credibility in the Indian renewable energy industry, they also illustrate our strong relationship with these institutions. We expect debt financing at more favorable terms than those currently prevailing in the market. Furthermore, these agreements are poised to have the way for securing substantial funding for projects with larger capital requirements, and collaboration with these entities reinforce our commitment to optimizing financing revenues, thereby advancing our projects towards completion on time and with enhanced cost effectiveness. I'll now move to Slide 13, which provides the highlights of the first quarter of the fiscal year 2024. Overall, the quarterly performance was in line and in fact, marginally higher than our interim budget, and we are on track to meet our guidance for the fiscal year. We reported a profit after tax of USD 36 million as compared to a loss of USD 1.2 million last year. The reported profit is one of the highest ever reported by us. Our installed capacity increased from 7.6 gigawatts in Q1 FY '23 to 8.4 gigawatts in Q1 FY '24, an increase of 10% compared to the same quarter in the previous year. Wind PLF were lower compared to the levels achieved in the prior year, but we had captured this in our FY '24 guidance. Turning to Page 14, our adjusted EBITDA of the first quarter of fiscal…

Thank you, Kedar. Now turning to Page 19. As many of you know, at ReNew, we have an ESG committee at the Board level, which highlights how important sustainability has been at ReNew and continues to be. ReNew is one of the pioneers in the industry to disclose Scope 3 GHG emissions through an inventory-based approach across all relevant categories in our annual report and CDP submission. In fiscal year '23, with the deployment of robotic cleaning and condition-based module cleaning, we saved about 313,000 Kiloliters of water, which is an improvement of about 48% year-on-year. We have achieved carbon neutrality for our operations across all our sites, 3 years in a row now. For our SBTi net zero target, we have a 4.8% reduction in Scope 1 and 2 emissions. In the first year of disclosure, there has been significant progress in avoided emissions powering about 4.8 million homes with clean energy for fiscal year '23, marking a 20% year-on-year increase. In recent times, biodiversity has worked into a pivotal concern within the renewable energy sector. And with this in mind, we are glad to announce the release of our biodiversity policy for ReNew. Our CSR journey began in 2014. And since then, we have benefited the lives of over 1 million people across 500-plus villages in India per spanning over 10 states across the country. Now let's turn to Page 18, where I would like to switch to the specifics of some of our efforts. Lighting Lives. This is an initiative where we electrify schools with less than 3 hours of electricity using Solar [indiscernible]. Till date, we have electrified 120 schools and established 54 digital learning centers. We have recently entered into a long-term partnership with HSBC to electrify 75 schools across our areas of operation. Women for Climate. In this program, our efforts include more women in the energy sector, we have programs on green skilling in partnership with UNEP, which is the United Nations Environment Programme. We are skilling traditional women saltpan farmers in Gujarat to become renewable energy technicians. Community based water management. In this program, arid regions of Rajasthan and Gujarat, we de-silted 10 lakes, constructed 120 water tanks and have excavated 18 waterfalls across these regions to provide access to drinking water to communities, which is a critical need of theirs. We have kick started the fiscal year '24 disclosure cycle with the submission of CDP climate change. Over the next couple of months, we will also be releasing our fiscal 2023 sustainability report and look forward to sharing the highlights of this in our next earnings call. With that, I turn to Sumant for comments on our fiscal year '24 guidance.

Yes. Thanks, Vaishali and Kedar. The first quarter was in line with our internal budget, and we are on track to achieve our fiscal year '24 guidance, and we are confident about our run rate numbers. While we are focused on delivering the projects in the current fiscal, we have started executing the plan for the remainder of the pipeline that is due for completion towards the end of FY '25. With regard to our buyback, we have repurchased 34.5 million shares to date which represents about 32% of the free float at the time of listing. We have about $35 million of authorization remaining, which would represent about 5% to 7% of the total share float. With that, we will be happy to take questions. Nathan, over to you.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Justin Clare from ROTH MKM.

First off here, I was wondering, could you talk about the projects that were completed in Q1? It looks like those projects were completed ahead of the targeted COD dates. So just wondering, what may have enabled you to complete those projects earlier than expected? And then also looking at your other project timelines, it looks like 300 megawatts of utility-scale solar projects were moved forward in terms of their COD dates about 1 year. So maybe you can just speak to project timelines in general. Are you seeing them shorten, and what might be driving that trend?

Sure. Thank you, Justin. Always good to talk to you. Look, I'll answer the question in general. And then for the specific project that you refer to, I'll defer to Nathan or Kedar. Look, as far as project execution timelines are concerned, I wouldn't say that there's been any dramatic change in terms of pulling things forward in general or the times are shortening. I think it all depends on the overall availability of transmission, land and so on. And that, I would say, is going as per plan at this point. It could be that there are a couple of projects here and there where, maybe we were able to quicken the land acquisition process or something like that. And therefore, we might have speeded them up. But there is no -- I won't say that there's a systemic improvement in timelines at this point in time. As far as the first quarter of project commissioning is concerned, yes, we did put a lot of effort to make sure that we got those done in the month of June itself before the monsoons really started, because once that happens, then construction becomes really harder. So we did put some extra effort behind making sure those projects would get commissioned in Q1 itself. So one -- just to sort of segue to another area, of course, one important thing that is happening is that module prices have gone down quite substantially. And in some ways, this is actually a very, I think, strongly reaffirmed the plan that we had of postponing execution from last year, because now we are seeing module prices coming down very, very sharply. And that is actually helping us decrease CapEx of our solar plants very substantially. As you know, now we're getting mono-PERC modules per watt at a price of about $0.15 to $0.17, which is just unbelievable, because compared to last year, we were getting modules at $0.24, $0.25. Prices have come off very dramatically since then. So that's really, really, I think, just put into stock sort of affirmation of the fact that we have taken the decision to postpone some of the plans, and that is really benefiting us now.

Okay. Great. That's helpful. And then maybe just shifting to the 3.5 gigawatts that you had won at auction year-to-date here. I was wondering if you could just talk through the timelines there. When could you potentially sign the PPAs? And then when could the COD dates likely be for that capacity? And then this is a very significant amount of capacity won in a short period of time here. Does that affect your plans for bidding going forward? Because I know you're kind of targeting a 3 to 4 gigawatt per year run rate. You're already there essentially with the capacity that you've won at auction. So just wondering how we should think about things moving forward.

Yes. So the 3.5 gigawatts, as you know, we won in the last few months. Most of that is to be commissioned in FY '26. So if you think about our current pipeline of 5-odd gigawatts that we have committed right now, that will be getting constructed FY '24 and FY '25, mostly. And all of this 3.5 gigawatts will be getting done in FY '26. So in a way, it just moves forward our execution pipeline to 1 more year. And as you know, these are just the first projects that have been auctioned this year. We're just barely starting the government's program of 50 gigawatts for the year. There's another 43 gigawatts of auctions that have been announced that have not happened yet, which will be happening in the remainder of the year. And if you go with our regular market share of 10% to 12% or thereabouts, then you should expect that we can pick up a lot more capacity out of that. Now the question for us, of course, is as you rightly said, when will that be commissioned and will be ready for execution. And so the future projects that come up will probably be towards the second half of FY '26 or FY '27. And so to that extent, we might selectively win some more projects from this point on in the next few months, just to make sure that we have sufficient sort of capacity build-out happening into FY '27 as well. PPA signing, to your question on that, does take a few months. It also depends on the nature of the project. Out of that 3.5 gigawatts, as you know, 400 megawatts with the Gujarat government has just been signed already. So that actually should go into our committed pipeline. But there's…

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Nikhil Nigania from Bernstein.

So my first question is on the Standstill agreement. If you could please share some color on, what was the rationale or motive behind that?

The Standstill agreement between the company and CPPIB?

CPPIB, correct.

I mean the logic there really was that CPPIB, as you know, of course, is already a 52% economic donor of the company's shares. And as per the shareholder's agreement, they wanted to get an additional Board seat. And essentially, the Board said that, look, I think let's make sure that you do not consider to increase your ownership in the company without doing something which is a much broader kind of an offer to all shareholders. And so really it was just for that purpose that Standstill agreement was put in place. And frankly, Nikhil, this is quite common among where there is in various companies that with the largest shareholder, such Standstill agreements are agreed to. And so really, that's why our Board was advised by our counsel that such an agreement with our largest shareholder would actually be quite -- both, standard and also would be protective of minority shareholders.

Got it. Understood. The second question is then on future plans on three activities, mainly wafer manufacturing, one is PLI bid. Second is merchant capacity, if any, plants and third is on storage. If you could share your color on any plans on these three?

Yes. So on manufacturing, as you know, we talked about the fact that our 4 gigawatt module plant is now commissioned and fully running. We are also setting up 2 gigawatts of additional module capacity in Dholera along with 2 gigawatts of cell capacity. The module capacity will be ready by early next year, taking our total module capacity up to about 6 gigawatts. Our cell capacity will be ready towards the second half of next year. And then the PLI bid win that we had was, as you know, for 6 gigawatts of wafer cell and module. And therefore, the balance part of the wafers and the cells, we are looking at right now. And at the appropriate time, we will consider going forward with it. So that's where we are on the module -- on the solar manufacturing part. The second question that you asked was around -- sorry, can you just repeat, Nikhil, if you don't mind?

Sure, that's merchant capacity. Any plans for the merchant renewable capacity?

Yes. Yes. And the third is around PSP. So on merchant capacity, the reality is that, as you know, the expectations in the Indian market are that we'll be running into significant deficit on the Peak Power. And power demand growth in India is very robust, as we all know. We also know that new capacities in thermal, while they might get planed, will take several years to actually come on stream. And so our sense is that there is going to be a fairly significant deficit in the market for the near term. So merchant capacity is something that we will be doing in two ways. One is we will be setting up certainly dedicated merchant projects to a certain percentage of our portfolio. The second thing is that we will also have merchant exposure through our Peak Power project, where there will be some overflow through our RTC projects. And I think the third way is that we will also be setting up projects, which we will then potentially, depending on the PPA side, then apply to PPAs, whether corporate or SECI. And so for some period of time, we will take advantage by commissioning them early and essentially getting exposure to the merchant market. There, we expect prices will be significantly higher than in the PPA market. So by a combination of those mechanisms, we expect to get exposure to the merchant market, which we believe will be significantly value accretive for us in the short run. And now with SECI now coming out with the view that you can construct a project and then essentially later on, dig that into a PPA, will have the flexibility as we believe over time to then potentially move those from merchant to PPA as well. And that's a call…

Very clear. Just two more questions from my side. One is on the answer for the receivables. So firstly, great to see them come down to such a level from over 200 last year. But now if I look at it going forward, from Andhra Pradesh, please correct me if I read it correctly, there's still a receivable DSO of 371 days. So should we understand that while they have paid the installments, but they have stopped paying future billing done since those installments started happening? So the issue -- the core issue still remains, am I correct to read that?

No, Nikhil, that's not correct. What they have been doing is, in fact, not with them, but all states have not just been paying their old outstandings as per the agreement that they had with the central government under the Late Payments Surcharge Scheme. But all the states have also been paying their current dues that have been on the current billings that have been done. Now the question then, of course, is why does AP have such an old outstanding, also the long outstanding. And that's a fair question. The reason is that 3 years ago when they had actually disputed the contracts, at that point, they had also disputed certain clause of the contract -- certain clauses of the contract. And while they paid the bulk of it, those two, three things that are still outstanding, still have to get resolved. Now what are those two, three things? One is the fact that they had said that for GBI, which was the generation based incentive, that since the Center was paying that, which is equal to about INR 0.50 per unit, that they should not be paying that. And so that, for example, forms or is a reasonable amount of capital that is still stuck. So we need court of -- sort of court processes to go through on these couple of items to get them to pay the old outstanding. So that really is -- really the issue. Our sense is that all of those things will get resolved, but it's just that we have to go through court process to get some of those things done because those payments, they had put in to dispute some time ago. And there -- as I said, there are legal proceedings that are going on in those. So those will get resolved eventually, and those payments will also happen. But it is not because they're not paying the current billings. They are, and so are all the other States as well.

Just one last question then was on number of employees. So I think I missed it last time. So in the annual report, if I see the number of employees have gone up from about 1,000 on average for FY '21 to 2,000 now. I understand, I mean, this is largely as ReNew enters manufacturing and other areas and capacity growth. How do we see this going forward? Do we see this continue to rise as hydrogen becomes sizable and more opportunities come, or how do you look at it?

Yes. So first of all, we are very focused on costs because obviously, we have to look at our manpower productivity and manpower costs. That's very critical, and that's something that we are monitoring very, very carefully, okay? But you're right that most of the people increases are happening primarily on account of manufacturing. Because obviously, these are more people-intensive areas than the project businesses. And so a lot of the growth is going to happen in that area. So as we build out our module side and then the cells side, and the wafer side eventually, then we will have a lot more people coming with the company as a result of that. Now exactly how many, will depend on the pace of the rollout, so I can't give you a number for that. So that's as far as manufacturing is concerned. As far as things like Green Hydrogen are concerned, of course, we have a development and business development team for that -- project development and business development team for that. But that's not that many people. Because as you know, most of the execution eventually will sit in the RE arm of our company, given that most of the capital is going to go into the renewable energy part. And then, of course, there'll be some of the electrolyzer part, but we'll hire those people only when we get to execution for those areas. We will not be obviously hiring those people in the beginning itself. So we do have some people for project development and business development, but that's like in the 10s, it's not even in the hundreds. It's smallest numbers. So I think that's really where things are right now. And then depending on the rollout of the business, in a fairly cost managed way, we will think about hiring more people.

This concludes the question-and-answer session, and that does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.