News Release Details

Message from Director (Finance)
New Delhi   05-Aug-2019

My dear fellow IOCians,

Most humbly and with lot of gratitude I thank you all for the guidance and support provided all through these years and blessings and good wishes showered upon me which has enabled me to reach this milestone. At this juncture, I am simply awed by the sheer vastness and magnitude of the operations and the future challenges & plans of the Corporation and the corresponding responsibilities and the demands to serve in the new capacity! However, our leaders and predecessors have put in place a well-greased system that the machinery of mindboggling activities goes on amazingly smoothly 24x7 with the help of highly competent and experienced manpower and this definitely would be of great help.

While the Corporation has been doing exceedingly well operationally, the transformation, mandated by the Government as well as those happening globally, poses new challenges in sustaining our core strength. At the same time, the need to expand our horizon in new energy areas in line with our vision and carve out a significant position for ourselves is also equally challenging. Coupled with all this, the profitability is under strain mainly due to various extraneous factors partly beyond our control and partly for our social responsibility, being a frontier national oil company. This all puts us in perhaps unprecedented situation where most innovative solutions in products, processes and service delivery are called for so as maintain our numero uno position as a supplier of choice.

There is enormous demand on capital to fulfill our aspirations in core verticals as well as in new business verticals. We need to be abuntantly cautious in assessing and mitigating risks of newer businesses. While the deregulation of MS/HSD and reasonable price levels have provided a breather from high borrowing levels, the same cannot be taken for granted. Hence, initiatives to optimise capex, unlock working capital and increase profitability, including through cost optimisation, are the need of the hour.

Overseas investments, cross-border transactions, M&A opportunities, new business verticals, GST regime, emerging IT technologies, etc. demand acquisition of relevant updated knowledge, inter alia, by Finance fraternity and the efforts in this direction should increase so that we can strive to reinforce ourselves as knowledgeable business enablers. Networking and keeping pace with developments elsewhere is important as it enables us to adopt best practices. Increased interest in our stock and evolving internationally converged accounting standards require that we maintain excellence in our core accounting and reporting domain also.

Signing off for now with all humility and prayers that I live up to the expectation and confidence reposed in me. Wishing us all great times ahead!

( Sandeep Kumar Gupta )

Director(Finance)