KEC International Expects Orders Rs 25,000 Crore This Fiscal

Infrastructure engineering, procurement and construction major KEC International Ltd. aims an order inflow of Rs 25,000 crore in the current financial year, backed by recent order wins. The company is looking at a robust order book during this period, despite execution challenges.

KEC International on Wednesday informed the stock exchanges about securing two orders worth Rs 1,171 crore in the Middle East. The company had earlier this week won another order of Rs 1,079 crore.

The company has already secured orders close to Rs 10,000 crore in fiscal 2025 so far, according to Vimal Kejriwal, managing director and chief executive officer of the company.

“As far as the order pipeline is concerned this financial year, we already got orders close to Rs 10,000 crore, and we are L1 in another Rs 7,500 crore. Our stated announcement is that we should be doing Rs 25,000 crore of order intake for this year,” he told NDTV Profit.

The company is also looking at a massive tender pipeline of Rs 1.5 lakh crore, according to Kejriwal. This includes tenders that KEC has quoted but are not yet open, as well as those that the company is looking to quote in the next two or three months.

However, Kejriwal acknowledged the labour shortage faced by the company recently and the execution challenges.

“Execution has been a challenge in terms of labour in our civil business and T&D (transmission and distribution) business. A little bit of challenge still continues on the supply chain side, especially in the case of pipes, transformers and conductors, although it's easy now,” he said.

Since the industry has been facing this challenge for more than a year now, people have expanded capacity to cope with it. KEC has also built its own plant, Kejriwal said, adding that the supply chain challenge is slowly easing out.

“In the last one and half months, we were able to get an additional 3,000 to 4,000 people, but we are still short of 20% people and it's across the industry. We had expected that people had gone home for elections and they would come back. There have been two challenging quarters, otherwise we would have probably done better. But we are slowly seeing labour returning,” the top executive said.

Worker shortage is also translating into muted financial results, Kejriwal said. However, he exuded confidence that KEC's margins will improve in the next two quarters. “Our margin guidance for the year has been 7.5%, which effectively means that in Q3 and Q4 we have to have a significantly better margin. These quarters will be revenue heavy so the margins will definitely go up,” he said.

KEC is also looking to win projects that can bring better margins, since it already has a healthy order inflow for the current financial year. “Right now we are closing all the older projects which were at a lower margin. Once the new projects are coming into execution, we will clearly see margins improving,” Kejriwal said.

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