Texmaco Rail To Use Newly Discovered Land Near Kolkata To Aid Growth, Says Vice Chair Mookerjee

Texmaco Rail and Engineering Ltd. is considering utilising its land parcel along the highways in Kolkata to support its growth plans, with detailed plans expected to be in place within the next three years, the company’s Vice Chairman Indrajit Mookerjee has said.

Talking to NDTV Profit, Mookerjee revealed the company’s plans to capitalise on the unused land that the management discovered while making plans to increase efficiency.

“I must tell you that within Texmaco, we have recently been trying to make ourselves efficient by putting the factories and the layouts together so that we become more efficient,” he said.

“And in that process, we realised that a prime piece of land, which is located on the highways on Calcutta, is something which we would not require for our production purposes,” Mookerjee added.

Texmaco is “very strongly” thinking of utilising this piece of land to aid its growth aspirations, the vice chairman revealed.

“We are very strongly thinking of developing that land because it is a prime piece of land, and which perhaps is going to give us funds which we will use for our growth as part of our growth aspirations,” he said.

This step will help the company improve its debt-to-equity ratio further, Mookerjee noted.

“We have a very healthy debt-equity ratio, and we want to improve it further. So these are the steps which will make us financially stronger,” he stated.

The top executive mentioned that the 11-acre land, positioned right on the highway, will be developed within four years of time.

“We already started taking action on that (the plan), and that's (coming up in) about three to four years,” he noted.

Speaking about the company's performance in the ongoing fiscal, Mookerjee mentioned that Texmaco expects to maintain the growth in its topline achieved in the first half of the financial year, although this growth may not solely come from freight cars.

“I expect that the growth will be sustained, but deliberately we would not like to put all eggs in one basket. We would like to have more diverse products,” he said.

“For example, we are looking very strongly at a design, and we are building our global capability centre in New Delhi. We also are looking at the export market. We are a very major player there in the export market. We just completed a very large order from a very prominent steelmaker in Europe,” he added.

Shares of Texmaco Rail & Engineering Ltd. dipped 2% on Tuesday to touch an intraday low of Rs 192.21 apiece on the NSE. The stock was trading at Rs 192.45 per share at 1 pm, while benchmark Nifty 50 was down 0.25% at 23,586.35.