Confident of achieving FY16 revenue target: Ahluwalia

Shares in construction firm Ahluwalia Contracts have witnessed a 20 percent rise this year.

The company had earlier forecast its revenue for fiscal year 2016 to be Rs 1300 crore. For the first half of this fiscal, reported revenue stood at about Rs 546 crore.

But in an interview with CNBC-TV18, the company's Deputy MD Shobhit Uppal said it is confident of achieving its revenue target as the second half traditionally sees more revenues.Below is the transcript of Shobhit Uppal’s interview with Mangalam Maloo and Reema Tendulkar on CNBC-TV18. Mangalam: You had earlier indicated that your revenue for FY16 will be Rs 1,300 crore, but in the first half itself, your company has reported revenues just about Rs 546 crore. So, keeping this in mind, are you confident of achieving your Rs 1,300 crore target? A: No, we are confident. We will attain this target. Traditionally, the second half is always the one where there is the output is much more especially in the last quarter, so we are confident that we will meet our target of Rs 1,300 crore. Reema: What about margins because your margins improved in Q2 on account of a better mix. With the low margin legacy orders being phased out or pushed to future quarters, should we expect margins to deteriorate in the coming quarters? A: They will be at similar levels and we will meet our projections. Reema: And what would those projections be on the margin front? A: It is about, H1, it has been about 13.5 percent margin and we will keep it at that level. Though our projection was 13 percent for the entire year, but we will maintain what we have attained. Mangalam: What is your current order book situation and what further order inflows are you expecting in the remaining part of this year? A: Our order book today stands at Rs 4,200 crore. As far as our new orders in this year is concerned, we have bagged orders worth about Rs 1,400 crore. Our target for the entire year was Rs 1,600 crore and we expect that we will comfortably beat it. We expect orders worth about 600-700 crore more in the balance part of the year.