Comments
After a rebound in its fortunes, public sector company ITI Limited has lined up plans to stay on the profitability path, by expanding data centres, manufacturing 3D-printed products, adding employees and a follow-on public offer.
The state-run electronics company, which was in the red till recently, saw a turnaround in its fortunes and returned on the profitability path, on the back of government projects, coupled with work from some private companies. The company is also in talks with Amazon to host some of their technology on its data centre.
With this momentum, ITI plans to pump in ₹700 crore as a part of its in its data centre business. “This is a first step towards the 1000-mile journey and we are confident of breaking even in the next 3-4 years,” S Gopu, Chairman and Managing Director, ITI, told BusinessLine . This data centre provides services such as hosting emails, surveillance and managing technologies remotely, which are similar to the ones provided by private providers. Apart from expansion of Bengaluru data centre, it plans to launch a new one in Uttar Pradesh.
For 16 years, ITI, which was declared sick, took government help to put its business back on track. These efforts included discarding older businesses (such as manufacturing of landline phones) but focussing on new areas such as laying optical fibre network for BharatNet, communication technologies for Defence, hosting IT infrastructure and building capabilities in data analytics by partnering with start-ups. All this resulted in a profit of ₹102 crore for 2017-18.
Defence projects
“Our order book is ₹12,000 crore, of which ₹10,000 crore has come from Defence projects,” said Gopu.
Company executives said that it won these projects amongst bids placed by competitors such as BEL, RailTel and Sterlite. Around 60-70 per cent of its business comes from the government and the data centre expansion is seen as an effort to work on existing government projects and new one from the private sector.
In 2014, ITI got a ₹4,156-crore package from the Indian government. Also, grants, which are classified under other income at the end of March, were ₹1,647 crore. In March, the Cabinet cleared selling of 18 crore equity shares of ITI through a follow-on public offer in August, which will help the PSU meet the minimum 25 per cent public shareholding norm and reduce its debts.
The company, which currently has 3,450 employees, plans to add another 2,000 in three years. It has partnered with start-ups such as Cardiac Design Labs, Yuktix Technologies and Citrus Platform Solutions.
Comments
COMMENT NOW
Comments
Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.
We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of TheHindu Businessline and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.