‘GST to impact working cap cycle, put strain on liquidity’

“The transition to GST will disrupt the working capital cycle of businesses in the initial phase and thus easy liquidity in the system is essential for two to four months,” domestic ratings agency India Ratings said. 

Easy system liquidity is necessary to minimise the magnitude of such disruption and to absorb the sudden changes in requirement of short term finance, it added. Based on a study of 11,000 firms, it said input credit lock up could be around Rs one lakh crore, of which about Rs 50,000 crore could be blocked for about two months. This “may result in higher short term working capital requirement for businesses in the near term,” it warned. It said the task at hand is “humongous” and can be gauged from the size of closing inventory of around Rs 11.2 lakh crore as at FY16, which are at various stages of production process. 

Additionally, a 3 percentage point increase in service taxes to 18 per cent may put further stress on the short term working capital requirements for businesses, it said. It added that larger companies with stronger credit profiles will tide over the short term working capital disruption relatively easily as compared to the ones which have weaker credit profiles. It can be noted that the systemic liquidity has been on the surplus mode for the last few months, ever since a jump in deposits post note ban, and a jump in foreign portfolio investors’ inflows. 

The India Ratings note said this is a cause for concern as it impacts monetary policy objective of keeping the overnight rate and the shortest end of the yield curve anchored to policy rate.