Marine projects contribute 50% of order book: ITD Cementation

S Ramnath, CFO, ITD Cementation, in an interview to CNBC-TV18 spoke about the outlook for business going forward.  Porinju Veliyath, MD & Portfolio Manager, Equity Intelligence India on Friday in an interview to CNBC-TV18, said he expects the company to grow five-ten times in the next 2-3 years.The company provides solutions in the field of civil engineering and has signifiantly contributed towards country's infrastructure growth.Below is the verbatim transcript of S Ramnath’s interview with Ekta Batra & Anuj Singhal on CNBC-TV18.Ekta: The latest order book figure that we have from the company is Rs 6,000 crore. Can you just confirm this for us and tell us what exactly has order winning been like in this quarter. What do you expect in the next couple of months?A: Our year-end is December. So we had reported already around an order book of around Rs 5,204 crore at the end of December. That did not include certain L1 contracts like the Mumbai Metro being the largest one in that. Since then our order bookings have been fairly robust and although the major one the Mumbai Metro is yet to be awarded to us. So, I think we are on a good front, the quality of the order book is growing and hopefully we should be doing very well in this year and going forward.Anuj: When you say quality of orders is improving would you say that the set of orders that you are getting now would be at slightly higher margins compared to the ones that you have already in your order book?A: We have always pursued orders with profitable margins. However, what happened is over the last two to three years we had certain orders where we had some execution challenges, cost over runs not necessarily because of our internal reasons. So, because of that our margins had shrunk last year and we are improving that. So, in that sense the quality of the order book is very good compared to what it was say last year or beginning of last year.Ekta: How big is an opportunity is marine project/waterways for ITD Cementation?A: With regards to marine projects we have a leadership position in this country today - that is construction of ports, jetties, break water these kinds of facilities. We are also doing some major reclamation and dredging works in Jawaharlal Nehru Port (JNP). So, this forms a very major segment today and about 50 percent of our order book is from this segment. This segment in the next few years will continue to grow reasonably well. So, we are well positioned there. We also have a presence in metros, dams and canal projects and irrigation works. Water is still a smaller segment where we are in micro tunnelling or laying down water pipelines for drinking water.Waterways, which is a very big landmark development for the country like linking rivers etc is not a major marine development or major ports development. It is more to facilitate inland transportation of goods, services and people. We are not in it yet.