It’s a mixed bag of goodies for major corporate houses. While the taxation departments and finance chiefs at big business houses were assessing the impact on their groups finances, one thing became certain that corporate India was not willing to absorb the hike in excise duties or the increased coverage and intensity of service tax but would instead look to pass this on to consumers.
The Ruia controlled Essar group anticipates an overall benefit from initiatives announced by Pranab Mukherjeee to boost investment in the power, steel and ports sectors. The group also expects to see reduced costs in the electricity sector where it operates through Essar Power.
"Increased allocation for roads will lead to a higher demand for bitumen, which refiners like us will benefit from. It is good to note that the government has begun a pilot project of direct transfer of subsidy to buyers of kerosene and cooking gas," said L.K. Gupta, managing director at Essar Oil.
His colleague V. Suresh, chief financial officer in the Essar power business group, believes that liberalisation in ECB financing will enable availability of more debt resources at a lower cost for the power sector.
"Dividend distribution tax rationalisation will help improve return on equity for the multi-tiered structure of most powercompanies. Along with steps being taken to improve coal availability, the budget signals a significant turnaround for the power sector."
For Mahindras, the negative impact of the increase in excise duty on cars and tractors came with a major sigh of relief that the government did not go after diesel powered vehicles. Even the hike in excise duty on automobiles is being seen by the industry as a reversal of the earlier stimulus. "There is a sense of relief that no major crisis happened via a tax on diesel powered autos," said Pawan Goenka, president automotive and farm equipment sectors at M&M.
The higher incidence of service tax in the Mahin-dra groups resorts and real estate businesses will be passed on to customers while higher excise duty too will result in prices of tractors and autos rising. "We expect prices of tractors to be hiked by between Rs3,000 and Rs6,000 apiece while the price hike for M&M vehicles will be between Rs3,000 and Rs35,000," said Goenka.
The Anil Agarwal controlled Vedanta group will be negatively impacte with the cess on petroleum oil produced in India being almost doubled to Rs4,500 per tonne. Cairn India which accounts for one of the largest share of the groups operating profits in India would see its cash flows being curtailed.
Cement firms such as Aditya Birla owned UltraTech cement which are riding the wave of strong demand plan to hike cement prices by Rs2-3 per 50 kgs bag to pass on the impact of the tax increases.
While the Birla group has almost 60 per cent of its revenues coming from overseas operations it does not see a major benefit from the extension of the benefit of repatriating dividends from overseas subsidiaries at a concessional rate by one more year.
"We do not have a large scale repatriation of our profits to India. So this is of limited benefit to us. But given our increased focus and investment on R&D we willbenefit from the extended tax allowance for such investments," said two top Aditya Birla group officials.