L&T margins should improve in Q4 of current year and next 4 quarters: CFO

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

R Shankar Raman, Whole-Time Director & CFO, L&T, says “as a strategy, the company is looking at asset-light return high areas of operations. Consequently, the cash that gets generated beyond the requirement of the company is meant for shareholders. Returning money to shareholders can take a couple of forms.

Dividend is one obvious way of providing a return back to the shareholders. Buyback is a good way. Buyback will not happen as regularly as dividend which is an annual feature.

But once in a while, when we are able to accumulate sufficient cash surpluses, buyback along with a normally healthy dividend rate will be the way to go.”What is the biggest advantage L&T has started the year with?The biggest advantage that we have as we started the year was a very healthy order book. Nearly Rs 4 lakh crore of orders meant that we had to get on a fast track in terms of execution and in our industry, as we work under the skies, April-June is a good quarter because we do not have interruptions from monsoons etc. So generally, we get quickly on to completing projects in the first quarter.

The biggest driver, if I may call that, is that most of these are marquee projects and they are under supervision of either the world financing bodies, multilateral agencies or are priority projects for the government – both state and centre. So the extent of oversight and the support that we had received has also been very encouraging and this has helped us move ahead. We are possibly just leaving the Covid impact behind.

We have been able to mobilise resources in our various project sites and get going on that front. That has been the real reason for revenue growth. EBITDA is a function of the volume growth that we have been able to achieve on