The Dark Horse of Indian Building Construction Industry: Capacit’e Infraprojects
Rohit Katyal and Rahul Katyal, on a mission to make India’s Towering Aspiration a reality. Changing the Mumbai skyline.
Katyal brothers picked the two key ingredients that were missing in the high-rise Construction space in India – the use of modern construction technologies and leveraging it to ensure that the construction gets completed faster while ensuring high-quality standard.
Capacit’e Infraprojects Limited which was incorporated in August of 2012 with a belief that building construction segment which is fragmented in the overall umbrella of infrastructure, carries a huge opportunity, from a skills perspective and through the introduction of technology into the segment. And rightly so, today building construction is recognized as a distinct infrastructure vertical.
Overwhelmed by the positive response for the technological adoption and project planning and management skills, company decided to go public in 2017. The Rs 400 crore IPO received thumping response from the investors.
Capacit’e, today has established a firm footing as an exquisite construction company. Within a short span of time, the Company has emerged as one of the most preferred partners in India’s high-rise and super high-rise construction segment, distinguishing themselves with innovative solutions and an unmatched domain knowledge. Today, Capacit’e strong brand recall compels clients to constantly seek their expertise to deliver the needs of new-age high rises.
The construction industry faced challenging times due to COVID-19 especially the building construction companies which have a dominant presence in urban areas. Industry faced multiple issues in terms of slow pick up in construction activity, supply chain disruptions, large scale labour migration specially from Mumbai & Delhi as well as liquidity challenges. The situation was actually very grim and no one had a clue, where things were leading.
Remaining stagnant do not make way for tomorrow. Reviving from the COVID-19 outburst on the business, Capacit’e has seen situation improved drastically. The workmen availability issues seem to be thing of past with labour availability reaching 100% of the pre-covid situation (from lows of 5%). The supply chain has also seen a marked improvement, obviously with certain new norms, which we believe are here to stay. The property registration numbers have been also encouraging in last couple of months which is also reflected in request from company’s clients for expediting the execution which is again a positive sign for the sector.
After amassing the prequalification and as a part of strategy to diversify, the Company started focusing on orders from public sector. The Company believes that the next phase of company’s growth will be dominated from public sector order book. The infrastructure push by government, especially post the pandemic to revive the economic activity cannot be ignored.
The company ended the quarter with an INR147bn order book with public sector orders, which now constitute 68% of the total order book (including the BDD Chawl, Worli project under SPV).
The company has projects from CIDCO for construction of mixed-use building, MCGM-Bhagwati Hospital and PWD (JJ Hospital), BSNL Data Centres for DRDO and MHADA as part of its public sector order book.
Alongside strong government order book, the company has an order book of Rs. 47bn from the private sector mostly from reputed large developers including Oberoi Realty, Raymond Realty, Piramal Realty, Phoenix, K Raheja, Godrej amongst others with strong balance sheet position.
Promoters believe that the government’s resolve to boost infrastructure development, be it hospitals, education institutions, housing for all is very positive for specialized construction companies. The company is also confident that the Atmanirbhar Bharat call will also open gates for factory construction, ones the pandemic situation eases out. With the experience and the balance sheet strength, Katyal’s are hopeful of being one of the biggest beneficiaries of the same.
The company has also invested in developing technology via its associate company Captech Technologies. Captech Technologies has recently launched India’s first multi-lingual construction tech platform ‘eFORCE’ to bridge in the gap between general contractors/project developers, migrant labor contractors & specialized vendors.
With a vision of evoking a distinctive brand recall of “Think construction, think Capacit’e, the company is leading the success story in the Indian Real Estate construction Industry.
