Precious Shipping Public Company Limited

The July-September 2001 (Vol 26, No 3) issue of Vikalpa had published a Management Case titled “ Precious Shipping Public Company Limited” by G Raghuram. In this issue, we feature three responses on the case from Ajay Pandey; Justin Paul; and Amit Paranjape, Indraneel Pandit, and Umesh Bali. Precious Shipping Public Company Limited (PSL) went through a process of financial restructuring in response to the economic crisis that hit Thailand in 1997. PSL faced trouble since payments were due in dollars and they had investments in Thai baht, which had devalued during the crisis. Being a professionally managed company with a high level of transparency in their transactions, they came out of the situation by managing to restructure their secured and unsecured debts. A large part of the unsecured debt proved a little more complex since it was tied to a swap. The case describes the financial restructuring process and the business scenario during the crisis, and provides an opportunity for learning about financial risk management.