Kalpataru Projects expects 25% revenue growth in FY24

It’s the best quarter ever in terms of numbers. We crossed ₹4,500 crore of revenue, the highest ever in a single quarter, at 19 per cent growth over last year. Our strategy was to take a large order book across various sectors, so if one slows down, the other moves, so that overall it doesn’t slow you down.  The transmission and distribution segment was exceptionally strong. And that made up for weakness in other segments, such as oil and gas. Q1 and Q2 are always slow compared to Q3 and Q4 when execution picks up. Now, when we started the year, we were very hopeful that we would get close to 30 per cent revenue growth on a full-year basis. I’m not sure of that, but 25 per cent on a conservative basis I think we should be able to pull that off.

So both have been very robust because we’ve now entered new geographies internationally. We added three new countries—you know, we are in Guyana and the Seychelles.  Post-merger, we’ve been taking the erstwhile JMC verticals overseas, so we have buildings and factory projects in the Seychelles and an airport project in the Maldives. All these places are giving us a lot of visibility, so our split is getting more evenly structured. So if you look at our order book currently, we are almost 40 per cent international and 60 per cent domestic . And order inflow is also more or less the same.

The transmission business in India was slow for 2–3 years. But now we’ve been having continuous order wins in our domestic transmission business since the start of the year. Practically every 2-3 months, we have order wins. We are in a very large civil infrastructure underground railway project, which is a huge technical upgrade in terms of complexity because there are only five or six companies that do TBM tunnelling. I think we are the lowest bidder there, and hopefully we get that contract. That will open a whole new segment, which is showing a lot of promise. In the building and factory segments, there are projects up for tender virtually daily. Real estate projects are getting bigger and bigger. Earlier projects used to be of the size of ₹100-150 crore; now they are of the magnitude of ₹500-600 crore.

We’ve already submitted bids for the Bhopal underground metro and elevated metro. In the next 6 months, Cochin is coming up with a metro project, Bhubaneswar is coming up with a metro project, Agra is coming up with another, and Mumbai is expanding. It’s just one after another; projects are lined up. In the transmission business, of course, we’re adding new geographies every quarter. If you look at our water business, we are now looking at large-scale water treatment plants. All these projects used to be very few earlier. We are now looking at technology projects. So that’s a new segment that we are adding to the water business. In terms of urban infrastructure, because of our merged capabilities and emphasis on engineering and building high-calibre teams, we are looking at marine bridges. We have bid for the bridge over the river Ganga. So we are looking at the sea link kind of projects in the government sector. These are segments that Kalpataru traditionally never did. The third is buildings and factories. A large number of data centres, large hospitals, and large factories have started coming up now. Some of the older companies that used to do them are no longer present. So that presents a big opportunity for us.

The focus for us now is Latin America. We are present practically everywhere, from Brazil, Peru, Uruguay, Guyana, to Surinam. And the whole place is undergoing hyper-development activity. We have a big project in Chile. We have been building capabilities in the region over the last three years. We acquired Fasttel in Brazil, and we are finishing the legacy projects. We are strengthening our team. So while this opportunity is huge, we are very cautious about who we are. We want to focus on growth, but not at the cost of margin. In developed countries, we are looking at Australia. We’ve opened an office there, and we have been supplying towers there for the last 10 years, but we are one of the few Indian companies that have set up base and are actively bidding for EPC projects. In oil and gas, we are bidding in Saudi Arabia, Oman, Abu Dhabi, and the UAE, so that is a new area for us as well and a new segment that we are actively pursuing.