Godrej Properties Expects FY22 Sales Bookings To Beat Last Year's Record

Godrej Properties expects its sales booking this fiscal to surpass the last year's record Rs 6,725 crore despite the outbreak of second wave of COVID-19 and hopes to cross Rs 10,000 crore mark in the next financial year.

Mumbai-based Godrej Properties expects "muted" sales in the April-June quarter because of the ongoing second wave of coronavirus disease and lockdown in various parts of the countries, its Executive Chairman Pirojsha Godrej said in a call with analysts.

The company's sales bookings grew 14 per cent to an all-time high of Rs 6,725 crore during the last financial year, despite overall demand slowdown in the market because of the pandemic.

It achieved sales bookings of over Rs 1,300 crore each across four major markets -- Delhi-NCR, Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR), Bengaluru and Pune.

Asked about the sales booking's target for the 2021-22 fiscal year in an analyst's call, Pirojsha Godrej said: "... I think as we sit in the middle of this crisis, it is a little difficult to project that with much accuracy."

"Our best estimate currently would be that we will see muted first quarter given what is happening," Godrej was quoted as saying in conference call transcript.

However, he said the muted sales in the first quarter could be compensated in the remaining nine months of this fiscal as it happened during 2020-21.

"But as we saw last year, that can be quite quickly made up for new launches and increased momentum once things turn more positive, which we expect will from the second quarter," Godeej said.

"We certainly expect to deliver booking value growth over FY 2021. Whether that growth is relatively modest or very high, I think it's a little hard to say given the current environment," he added.

Godrej said the company was targeting over 20 per cent growth in this fiscal before the onset of the second wave.

"But absent this current situation, we were expecting 20 per cent plus booking value growth, that might still be achievable if the medium-term impact of this isn't very severe. But I think it is a little premature to comment on that," Godrej said.

Over the medium term, he said the booking value growth and earnings growth should be very robust.

"If we are looking at just this new capital raise we did in the fourth quarter, should allow us to increase the scale of operations by more than 50 per cent once this capital gets deployed, not leaving aside the natural growth the business could have enjoyed aside from that," Godrej said.

The company, which recently raised Rs 3,750 crore through sale of shares to institutional investors through QIP route, aims to expand its operation manifold over the next four or five years.

"In the immediate term, I think in FY 2023 we hope to cross Rs 10,000 crore of booking value, that's next financial year. So, those are some of the numbers we have in mind," Godrej said.

During the full 2020-21 financial year, Godrej Properties reported a net loss of Rs 189.43 crore as against a net profit of Rs 273.94 crore in the previous fiscal. Total income declined to Rs 1,333.09 crore in 2020-21 from Rs 2,914.59 crore in the previous fiscal.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)