KPIT net profit at Rs 30.9 crore in March quarter

Technology firm KPIT has posted a consolidated net profit of Rs 30.9 crore and revenue from operations of Rs 501.2 crore for the quarter ended March 31. For the corresponding quarter of 2018-19, its net profit was Rs 55 crore, while revenue from operations was at Rs 641.2 crore, according to a regulatory filing. Last year, CK Birla Group-owned Birlasoft and KPIT Technologies had announced that they will merge and then split into two publicly-traded companies to create two specialised IT players.

After the demerger, the engineering business was incorporated on January 8, 2018, and listed on the BSE and the NSE as KPIT Technologies in April 2019. "Hence, the company was not mandatorily required to prepare and publish quarterly and annual financial results during the year ended March 31, 2018, and up to the quarter ended December 31, 2018," the company said in a regulatory filing on Wednesday. This is the first quarter after the demerger and the company looks forward to the exciting journey of focus and value creation for all KPIT stakeholders, KPIT co-founder, Chairman and Group CEO S B (Ravi) Pandit said in a statement.

He added that with focus on automotive engineering and mobility solutions, KPIT aspires "to become an over USD 500 million revenue company with improved profitability in the next 3-4 years". "We continued to grow faster than the industry during FY19 registering a constant revenue growth of 25 per cent over the last year," KPIT co-founder, CEO and MD Kishor Patil said. He added that the company is fairly confident of continuing to grow faster than the industry in the coming years with better profitability.

"During the quarter, we continued to divest our hardware based business in line with our strategy to focus exclusively on software intensive business. We are focusing on margin improvement and our aspiration is to achieve operating margins of 16-18 per cent in the next three years," he added. The board has recommended a final dividend at Rs 0.75 per equity share for 2018-19, subject to declaration of the same by members at the annual general meeting in August 2019.