OREANDA-NEWS. December 08, 2009. Members of Oleg Deripaska's Basic Element (BasEl) holding had combined earnings before taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) of approximately USD 1.5 billion in the first ten months of 2009, the group's CFO, Alexander Lukin, told Interfax, quoting interim management accounts.

"This is a significant improvement on last year," Lukin said.

BasEl has not published results for 2008, which the fourth quarter turned into one of the group's most unsuccessful years.

"We're pleased to see that the anti-crisis program, production optimization and cost-cutting have yielded results," Lukin said.

BasEl includes companies from the aluminum, power, machine building, resources, aviation, financial and construction sectors. Lukoil did not say how individual segments had performed, but he did say that "most businesses had produced better results than forecast." "This is true even of the automobile and construction businesses, but partly because we made fairly pessimistic forecasts for those. Even so we're seeing signs of recovery in these sectors," Lukin said.

"[Insurance company] Ingosstrakh is a good example. It continues to increase its market share at the expense of its competitors, who have run into difficulties, and is showing considerable earnings growth. EuroSibEnergo, SoyuzMetalResource and BaselAero are also showing good results," he said.

"The overwhelming majority of the group's companies closed the ten months with positive EBITDA," he said.

The energy sector, which includes RUSAL and EuroSibEnergo, has always made the biggest contribution to combined EBITDA.

Consolidated sales revenue was approximately USD 15 billion in the ten months. "All companies have fallen a little regarding revenues, to 2006-2007 levels. But you need to take the seasonal factor into account. This is fairly important for many of our businesses, and there are grounds to expect we'll get a good addition to the ten-month results in November-December," Lukin said.

BasEl's companies had revenue of USD 26.8 billion in the pre-crisis year of 2007.

Their combined debt is more than USD 20 billion today, and restructuring talks are in progress with respect to most of this.

"The restructuring plans are going fairly well. Some of them have been signed, and some are close to being signed, for example the En+ debt. We see good progress," Lukin said. BasEl expects to resolve all outstanding issues with the toughest creditor, Alfa-Bank before long, he said. He also said many of BasEl's businesses were "comfortable with their current level of debt."