1. At a Glance – PSU Refinery With Mood Swings and Money Bursts
Chennai Petroleum Corporation Limited (CPCL) is that PSU refiner which looks sleepy for years and then suddenly wakes up, drops a four-digit quarterly PAT, and goes back to hibernation. As of the latest close, CPCL sits at a market cap of ₹12,541 Cr, trades around ₹842, and sports a deliciously low P/E of 5.83—the kind that makes value hunters lick their calculators.
Q3 FY26 delivered ₹19,438 Cr revenue and ₹987 Cr PAT, reminding everyone that refining is not dead—it just throws tantrums. Debt is down to ₹1,933 Cr, promoter holding is a rock-solid 67.29%, and the company has re-entered fuel retail after decades, like an ex returning with glow-up energy.
Returns? +51% in one year, +54% in three years. ROCE currently looks sad at 4.3%, but that’s refinery cyclicality for you—blink and it changes. CPCL is cheap, volatile, PSU-controlled, and planning one of the largest refinery capex bets in Tamil Nadu. Excited or scared? Good. Keep reading.
2. Introduction – Refining Is Cyclical, CPCL Is Emotional
CPCL is not a compounder you marry; it’s a cyclical beast you date cautiously. When gross refining margins (GRMs) smile, CPCL prints money faster than RBI can say “liquidity.” When margins sulk, ROE collapses and Twitter analysts vanish.
The company operates primarily as a refiner, selling 92% of its output via its parent IOCL, with the remaining 8% sold directly. That dependency is both a safety net and a leash. CPCL doesn’t worry about marketing but also doesn’t fully control pricing power.
FY23 and FY24 were peak drama years—record throughput, capacity breaches, followed by margin normalization. Now FY26 Q3 comes in hot again with near-₹1,000 Cr PAT, retail marketing rights approved, and a mega refinery project
under construction at Nagapattinam.
Question for you: is CPCL a deep-value cyclic play or a capex time bomb waiting to explode?
3. Business Model – WTF Do They Even Do?
CPCL takes crude oil, cooks it aggressively, and sells the output mostly to IOCL. Simple? Not quite.
Core Products
High-Speed Diesel dominates with ~57% of sales, followed by:
- Motor Spirit: 13.5%
- Aviation Turbine Fuel: 10%
- Naphtha: 6.4%
- LPG: 2.75%
Specialty & High-Value Products
CPCL also produces paraffin wax, hexane, LAB feedstock, petroleum coke, sulphur, and petrochemical feedstocks—these are margin stabilizers when fuel cracks wobble.
Capacity
- Manali Refinery: 10.5 MMTPA (already breached nameplate capacity)
- Upcoming Nagapattinam Refinery: 9 MMTPA
- Wax Plant: 30,000 MTPA
- Propylene Plant: 30,000 MTPA
Basically, CPCL is no longer just a fuel refiner; it’s slowly sneaking into higher-value downstream products. The question is execution—PSUs aren’t famous for speed.
4. Financials Overview – Numbers Doing Bhangra
Result Type Detected: Quarterly Results (Q3 FY26 locked)
EPS Annualisation Rule Applied: Q3 → Average of Q1, Q2, Q3 × 4
Quarterly Comparison Table (₹ Cr)
| Metric | Latest Qtr (Dec-25) | YoY Qtr (Dec-24) | Prev Qtr (Sep-25) | YoY % | QoQ % |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | 15,683 | 12,925 | 16,327 | 21.3% | -3.9% |
| EBITDA | 1,478 | 242 | 1,144 | 510% | 29.2% |
| PAT | 1,002 | 21 | 719 | 4,720% | 39.4% |
| EPS (₹) | 67.26 | 1.40 | 48.30 | 🔥 | 🔥 |
Yes, the YoY PAT jump looks illegal, but last year’s base was depressed.
