As an early entrant in the Credit Rating business, ICRA Limited (ICRA) is one of the most experienced Credit Rating Agencies in the country today. ICRA rates rupee-denominated debt instruments issued by manufacturing companies, commercial banks, non-banking finance companies, financial institutions, public sector undertakings and municipalities, among others.
ICRA also rates structured obligations and sector-specific debt obligations such as instruments issued by Power, Telecom and Infrastructure companies. The other services offered include Corporate Governance Rating, Stakeholder Value and Governance Rating, Credit Risk Rating of Debt Mutual Funds, Rating of Claims Paying Ability of Insurance Companies, Project Finance Rating, Line of Credit Rating and Valuation of Principal Protected-Market Linked Debentures (PP-MLD).
ICRA's Infrastructure Sector Ratings encompass the Ratings assigned to debt programmes of issuers in the power, roads, telecommunications and other such infrastructure related sectors. Given the huge funding requirement in these sectors and the growing inability of the Government, both at the Centre and State, to fund such projects, private sector initiatives in infrastructure projects has come to assume paramount importance. At the same time, infrastructure projects are capital intensive, involve high leveraging, and have a long gestation period. Such projects require innovative structuring to make them bankable. ICRA, therefore, expects that Ratings in this sector will increasingly gain importance both from the issuers' and the investors' perspective. The Rating process involves an assessment of the fundamental viability of the project, being financed, a rigorous analysis of the political, legal and regulatory environment affecting the sector, and the contractual framework for mitigating risks. The rating sprocess also entails assessment of the specific credit enhancement mechanisms that the issuer may put in place to achieve a higher Rating compared with the one that would have otherwise achieved.
