Financial Health of Fertilizer Industry in India

The growing demand for fertilizers makes the Indian market highly attractive for domestic and foreign manufacturers. Recent policy changes by the government are a welcome step and will open up opportunities for local companies to strengthen their domestic presence and meet global aspirations. Financial distress for a company is the ultimate declaration of its inability to sustain current operations given its current debt obligations. This research work attempts to analyze the financial health of fertilizer sector in India and test whether Altman's Z score model can foresee correctly the corporate financial distress of the fertilizer sector in Indian context for the study period, 1991-92 to 2009-10. The Z score from the analysis shows that it is less than 1.81 in all most all the years implying that this sector has increased its debts and will be facing insolvency in near future unless regulatory measures are taken to tackle the adverse situation. The study demonstrates that individual ratio within the multiple discriminate framework has depicted miserable picture signifying inefficiencies within the firms that may endanger financial health of Indian fertilizer companies.