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| Edited By: G Seetharaman |Source: DNA |Updated: Mar 18, 2018, 03:05 AM IST
IRB Infrastructure Developers, one of the country’s largest highway developers, is looking to commission three of its highway projects by September, said chairman & managing director VD Mhaiskar.
These roads are together worth about Rs4,500 crore.
The company will by July commission the 114km stretch between Tumkur and Chitradurga in Karnataka and the 239km Surat-Dahisar project.
They are valued at Rs1,142 crore and Rs2,835 crore, respectively.
IRB has been tolling the Surat-Dahisar stretch since it bagged the project in 2009 because it’s a six-laning project. Mhaiskar said on Friday the daily toll collection on the road is Rs1.10 crore.
IRB collected toll worth Rs832 crore last fiscal as compared to Rs730 crore in 2009-10, a rise of about 13%. The company did not add any projects to its operational portfolio in 2010-11.
IRB is presently tolling ten roads, including Surat-Dahisar, has six in the construction phase, including Tumkur-Chitradurga, whose commissioning in July is 2-3 months behind schedule, and one in the development stage. IRB bagged the National Highways Authority of India’s (NHAI) first ultra mega project, a 102km stretch running from Ahmedabad to Vadodara costing Rs3,600 crore, last month.
IRB will by September operationalise its Rs430 crore state highway project in Kolhapur.
“These are the only three projects we will start this fiscal,” said Mhaiskar. He said there has been a traffic growth of 5-7% on its tolled roads but he refrained from giving the projected toll collection for this fiscal. “All I can is say we are looking at a topline and bottomline growth of 15-20%.”
Manish Kumar, analyst with SBICAP Securities, in a report dated May 23, said IRB is facing problems in starting the construction of the Goa road project and the management expects another quarter delay in the start of construction on the project. “We believe such delays will impact the growth and profitability of the group,” he wrote in the report.
In 2010-11 IRB’s topline and net profit rose 43% and 17.4%, respectively from a year ago to Rs2,438 crore and Rs452.3 crore.
The company’s net profit in the three months ended March, however, dropped 27.5% to Rs102.7 crore, which it attributed to the accounting of the minimum alternate tax for the whole year in the fourth quarter.
