Won't slip into losses; engineering biz to drive growth: Onward

Onward Technologies, a global player in mechanical engineering design and IT consulting services, has posted consolidated profit after tax (PAT) at Rs 1.2 crore versus loss at Rs 3.2 crore quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) for the June quarter this fiscal. Speaking to CNBC-TV18, Harish Mehta, Executive Chairman of Onward Technologies, said the company continues to witness growth opportunities across all verticals and will not slip into losses again.Onward's earnings are likely to improve significantly, particularly on the back of its engineering business, which has huge growth prospects, added Mehta. Below is the verbatim transcript of Harish Mehta\\'s interview to Latha Venkatesh & Sonia Shenoy on CNBC-TV18.Sonia: Take us through what went right this quarter and what does the segmental growth look like hereon?A: Onward Technologies is in two businesses. One is engineering business and second is IT business. Engineering is also software driven business but it is an IT enabled business.However, from business perspective engineering business is doing very well. There is a huge prospect going forward and the turnaround that happened is because we book our taxes in Q4, so we had a number of deferred tax payment to be charged. So that is partly the reason for the change. And for the last three years we have been investing in sales and marketing and capex for our engineering business and that has shown a significant growth last quarter to this quarter.Latha: Without the tax write back you would not be posting a profit?A: That was a year ago. We would have shown about Rs 1 crore losses last quarter. Latha: Is there any danger of your slipping back into loss because March quarter of 2015 was a loss then the remaining two quarters you turned a profit and again you reported a loss. So is this profit for good?A: Now we are in a strong wicket. You will see numbers improving significantly quarter-to-quarter both on the topline as well as bottomline.