Mumbai Metro coaches is the second metro tender that we have bid for in India. Earlier, we had bid for Nagpur which we lost by a whisker, Umesh Chowdhary, VC & MD, Titagarh Wagons, tells ET Now.
Edited excerpts:
You are competing with six other Indian and international firms for Mumbai metro coaches. What is the opportunity for you here and from other metros across the country that you are bidding for?
That is right, we have put in our bid for Mumbai metro. It is a very early stage for us to comment about this particular bid. There is an evaluation process. More significantly, we have acquired Italian subsidiary Titagarh Firema just for the metro business in India. We participated in the Nagpur metro bidding process and could not any more before the government policy was changed.
You have bid for Mumbai Metro coaches along with six other companies. What are the other metros that you would be bidding for?
I was telling you about the Mumbai Metro tender. We have bid along with our subsidiary Titagarh Firema in this bid. While this is the early stages of this tender being evaluated, what is significant is that the new Government of India policy on Make in India and the revised standard eligibility for wider participation in metro coaches entitles our company along with our subsidiary to participate in all the metro tender opportunities that are coming up.
This is the second metro tender that we have bid for in India, we had bid for Nagpur which we lost by a whisker. There should be a few others in the pipeline and so we are pretty excited about this space going forward.
We are talking about 24,000 wagon orders. How much of that would you want in terms of what proportion would you bid for and at what price? What is the plan there?
We have bid for the entire quantity. This was about 22,000 tenders and we have participated in the bid for the entire tender. Traditionally, orders are distributed between us and our subsidiaries. Between us and Cimco, we have 20-25% market share. We hope, we should be able to maintain our market share going forward. But at the end of the day, it is a tender process and no one knows how the bidding happens.
What are you targeting in terms of a financial performance for this year? From FY19 perspective, what is it that you are laying out as a target for sales as well as profits?
As far as FY19 is concerned, in the earlier calls, we had talked about the order book which has grown quite substantially in the Indian operations.
The European operations will take another year, year and a half to come back to profit. I would say that things are pretty much on track as far as Europe is concerned. In India, we are expecting very good growth in terms of the order book that we already have. It is going to get executed substantially this year.
We are looking at good growth in terms of the top line in India this year. As far as bottom lines are concerned, the margins are not historically what they used to be but they would be decent. We are expecting an EBITDA of anything between 10-12% that we should be able to maintain.
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