Bharat Electronics Ltd is targeting a turnover of Rs 6,300 crore for the current financial year “based on a healthy order book’’, Chairman and Managing Director Anil Kumar has said in the company’s Annual Report for 2011-12 released last week.
BEL, a public sector undertaking under the control of the Ministry of Defence, has order book worth Rs 27,000 crore, more than half of it for the supply of components and integration services for the Akash Missile Systems project.
In 2011-12, the company achieved a turnover of Rs 5,703 crore and a net profit of Rs 830 crore.
Net profit was a shade lower than in the previous year, and the 3.66 per cent fall has been attributed to “higher employee cost and high material content and lower value-addition due to the nature of contracts executed’’.
Defence budget
BEL sees a good future for itself thanks to higher Defence budget and the favourable ‘offset policy’ (which mandates a foreign supplier of defence equipment to source a fixed percentage (30 per cent) from companies in India.)
Mr Kumar has pointed out that the annual Defence outlay for the current year has been hiked 17.63 per cent to Rs 1.93 lakh crore.
“The Defence Offset Policy will gradually help in sourcing products or services from India. Many foreign companies will source directly from Indian companies or set up joint ventures to address the offset policy requirements,” Mr Kumar has said in a message to shareholders.
“There is an immense opportunity for BEL in the MMRCA project,” he has said, referring to the Medium Multi Role Combat Aircraft purchase, the order for which is likely to be placed on Rafale of France. (Incidentally, the fixed offset rate for this project is 50 per cent.)
On the BSE today, the BEL share closed at Rs 1,225.05.