Mumbai, May 25: Cairn India Ltd has reported a 10-fold rise in its net profits for the quarter ended March 31 on higher production and rising oil prices.

Net profits of the oil explorer jumped to Rs 2,457.79 crore compared with Rs 245.19 crore in the corresponding period of the previous year and easily beat the market’s consensus estimate of Rs 2,100 crore.

The company said its Edinburgh-based parent Cairn Energy Plc would sell 40 per cent of its stake in Cairn India to Vedanta Resources Plc from the Anil Agarwal group subject to regulatory and other approvals that were expected to come through this month. After the stake sale, Cairn Energy will have a residual interest of 21.7 per cent in Cairn India’s equity.

The January-March quarter saw Cairn India’s income rising to Rs 3,654.47 crore from Rs 692.83 crore in the last quarter of 2009-10.

The sharp jump in the topline was a result of the surge in the average daily gross production of the operating units to 161,194 barrels of oil equivalent (BoE) from 68,960 BoE.

BoE is the basic unit to measure oil and gas production.

Cairn India said the average oil price realisation in the fourth quarter rose to $94.2 per barrel compared with $71 per barrel in the same quarter last year. Gas price realisation stood at $4.5 per thousand standard cubic feet (mscf) over $4.6 per mscf in the year-ago quarter. Average price realisation per BoE was $91.9 in the period over $65.1 last year.

Consolidated revenues for the fiscal was Rs 10,277.9 crore against Rs 1,623 crore in 2009-10.

“Cairn India’s continued focus on safe and efficient operations has helped us to quickly ramp up the Mangala production to 125,000 barrels of oil per day (bopd) and deliver almost 40 million barrels of crude oil to Indian refineries,” said Rahul Dhir, managing director and chief executive officer of Cairn India.