Bharat Electronics hosted a conference call on Jan 30, 2025  In the conference call the company was represented by Manoj Jain, Chairman & Managing Director; Damodar Bhattad S, Director Finance & CFO and Sreenivas S, Company Secretary.

Key takeaways of the call

Major order executed in Q3FY25 are LRSAM , WLR (the weapon-locating radar), the IACCS system, the Shakti EW System, the ADC&RS the Akash speed program and one civililan project i.e. CBIC. 

Revenue growth for FY25 will be 15% or more. EBITDA margin definitely will be between 23% to 25% with upward bias. 

Against the order inflow target of Rs 25000 crore, the order inflow so far in current fiscal is Rs 11000 crore and confident of achieving the Rs 25000 crore inflow target for this year as many projects are in the pipeline.  Some of major orders such as PNC, CNC, Ashwini Radar, MI 17 etc are in advanced stage of finalization.

Order book as end of Jan 28, 2025 was around Rs 10893 crore. 

QRSAM – It is going in the right direction and hopeful of getting this order in 6-12 months well before March 2026.  There are many queries, configuration changes and other things from Army and Air Force.

Next fiscal will also see the finalization of another largest order i.e. MRSAM & MFSTAR related variants for nextgeneration corvettes and other ships.  And then there are some sub 5,000, 5, 6 more orders, which the company is really working for next year.  The NGC order worth Rs 14000-15000 crore has also made substantial progress.  Thus hoping the order book inflow next year will be between Rs 25000-50000 crore. 

Kavach order from Indian Railways -  Got an  initial executional order, which is technically a R&D or a prototype order for proving the company’s indigenous solution developed inhouse. Only after developing, installing and then getting the certification/testing by the railway authority is completed only IR will allow/qualify the company to participate in large tenders. May be by June- July 2025 it may go through this process of installing and testing and qualify for tenders. 

For 9mFY25 the gross margin was 44.5% and this is around the guided range of 42-44%. 

Want to increase the share of non defence to about 10-15% from about 8-10% range currently.  The diversification plans in non defence include network and cyber security related business, data centres and homeland security etc.