Bharat Forge to be a $1billion company by 2008: Baba Kalyani

Our Corporate Bureau
31 July 2006

Baba Kalyani, CMD, Bharat Forge says that the company had a revenue of over Rs1,000 crore for the quarter, and is positive that Bharat Forge will be a $1 billion company before 2008. CNBC-TV18 shares with domain-b its exclusive interview with Baba Kalyani:

Could you walk us through why the revenues have slipped sequentially for you?
Actually revenues haven't slipped sequentially.

Where have your sales figures been posted this time and how does that compare to Q4 '06?
Q4 is a big month because it is the year ending for all companies. So there are inventory build up issues and that is why one will see a difference.

What do you hope to see in terms of growth in the next few quarters and what sort of contribution will you see from your other acquisitions to that top line figure?
If one looks at our consolidated numbers, we have a revenue of over Rs 1,000 crore for the quarter and that reflects in the the results of our other acquisitions. PBT has been at about Rs 119 crore and PAT of about Rs 78 crore. So all the acquisitions have been positive for us and we expect to continue to do this in the next few quarters.

I think the difference in the next few quarters will be our domestic capacity in Pune, which will start ramping up. We have spent a fair amount of capital in doubling our capacity in Pune and the ramp up will happen in the next 2-3 quarters. Therefore, one will see much faster growth happening in India operations.

Where is the forging capacity at in your Pune unit at this point?
Right now we are at about 150,000 tonnes and we have expanded the capacity to about 240,000 tonnes. So we still have a fair amount of ramping-up to do, to get to that full capacity.