Questions for the Piramal Management

Since we have received replies for all our questions from Piramal, we asked a couple of more questions that we think are very important for investors to know. We will post the reply if and when we get them.

Thanks for your kind reply. As you might have gathered, we are closely following the performance of Piramal Enterprises.

We are extremely happy with the direction that the company has taken to redeploy the assets from the sale of the healthcare businesses. We are happy investors in the company and hope to be a long-time investors in the scrip.

Having said that, we also have a few questions that we would prefer the Chairman / CEO, to address the below two questions either in the conference call on Feb 11 or before. We are happy to call in with the same two questions at the conference call on Feb 11, if need be.

a. What metric does the management / promoters prefer we use to measure the progress of the company over the next three to five years? Right now we are using book value as a conservative, albeit an understated, proxy for the intrinsic value of the firm. We would like the management to establish a clear yardstick (they can chose) and show the progress over the next three to five years.

b. The stock right now is trading at a discount to book value. The book value is conservative as the Vodafone investments are still held at cost. Given these two factors, why is the Company not buying back stock more aggressively? Is the IRR of the new investments so much more higher than buying back stock? Secondly, if the IRR is indeed higher, why is the company not taking more debt to do buybacks?  If the IRR's for internal projects are higher, it implies that the company is trading at an even lower multiple / discount to book value?

Thanks for your patience in addressing the questions.