Bengaluru: Orders from metro transit systems in the country will be one of BEML Ltd's biggest drivers of growth, Chairman Deepak Kumar Hota said. BEML (previously known as Bharat Earth Movers Limited) has three divisions — earth moving, defence and metro — and the company also provides equipment for two stages of Akash missile and is its vital integrator.
The public sector company last year secured a contract worth Rs 3,015 crore for the Mumbai Metro corridor. "Other orders from metro systems in Delhi, Kolkata and Bengaluru take up most of the company's work. The company manufactures its coaches at the company's factory in Bengaluru," Hota said in an interview on the sidelines of Aero India 2019.
"Our order book is crossing Rs 10,000-crore [mark] and metro orders account for 40-50 percent of it," the CMD said.
BEML wishes to attain double-digit revenue growth in the near future. "We have seen some headwinds this year due to delays in defence orders. The growth rate is not going to be aggressive, but we'll grow at a steady rate," he added.
The government is also planning to divest 26 percent in BEML to a strategic investor. With the company's three important divisions, BEML is seeking a strategic investor with similar integrated divisions, Hota added.
At present, construction of over 650 km of metro rail projects are underway in Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, Chennai, Jaipur, Kochi, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Nagpur, Lucknow, Pune, Indore and Bhopal.