Welcome to Investors’ Edge— your daily dose of business insights, trends, and updates that matter. In this space, we go beyond the headlines to explore the evolving world of companies and industries. Each day, we bring you thoughtfully curated insights, sharp observations, and key developments shaping the business landscape.
Whether it's a strategic pivot by a market leader or an under-the-radar company making waves, we break it down for you — clearly, concisely, and consistently.
This 13th edition of Investor's Edge, published on June 24th, compiles key insights from numerous Q4 FY25 con-calls. Our analysis covers several capital goods companies, a financial conglomerate, a company acting as a proxy for global AI capex, and a few intriguing defense electronics manufacturers.….
KDDL
Might turnaround from a lull european demand from the past 2 years
“While the export environment for Swiss watches remains challenging, and consequently, also for us, we are monitoring the situation closely and remain optimistic about the future. Based on current indicators and market feedback, we anticipate a gradual revival, beginning in the second half of FY '26.”
— Yashovardhan Saboo (Chairman and MD)
Building adjacencies beyond the luxury watch market
“In anticipation of future demand and to support our growth ambitions, we have secured a 28,000-square-foot shed on lease in Bengaluru, not far from our existing facility. This new location currently under development will be operational in the second half of FY '26. We continue to focus on sectors that offer high entry barriers and long-term growth potential like alternate energy, comprising electrical vehicles and energy storage systems; aerospace; automotive; and electrical segments.”
— Yashovardhan Saboo (Chairman and MD)
Also getting on to the branded play leveraging the Ethos’s Luxury distribution in India
“So Favre Leuba, on the one hand, requires knowledge about distribution and about watch brands, which we have in our subsidiary company Ethos. And the large part about launching a new brand with products Swiss made is about being able to design and create product components for it, again where on the back end we have a huge experience with dial, hands, which are by the way very important because a lot of the creativity and the value of a premium watch. And dial, hands and bracelets is the very important part of it. Watch cases is the part that we are not doing, but in the future, it's a strategy, that we will make watch cases as well.”
Glass Lining Equipment manufacturers
HLE Glasscoat
End user Industry is outlook is turning positive
“From a macroeconomic standpoint, the outlook across our end user industry is turning positive. India is entering a multi-year CAPEX cycle with public and private investments gaining steady traction. In pharmaceuticals, stable demand and a renewed focus on compliance and innovation are driving fresh capacity creation and hence opening up opportunities for high-quality, technology-driven equipment like ours. Specialty chemicals continue to benefit from global substitution, sustainability shifts, and supply chain localization, supporting long-term infrastructure investments. Though agrochemicals face short-term pricing pressure, inventory normalization and policy support are setting the stage for a gradual demand recovery and CAPEX revival.”
— Himanshu Patel (Managing Director)
The US Tariff Fiasco is kicking up the global capex cycle outside of china
“The other trend that is emerging and I see emerging is the impact of tariffs that the U.S. finally will have on India and on China. In general, what we see right now, even right now when they have a trade deal agreed kind of with China and the trade deal with us is yet to be finalized, we are already seeing anywhere between 10% to 20% differential in the tariff. So, I believe that this is advantageous for India, at least for the U.S. market. I also think that there is also an uptick. What we see is that a lot of things that Europe was not manufacturing because of the trade wars with China, the war in Ukraine, continuing war in Ukraine and Russia, a lot of things, even the European countries, they have started investing in segments which earlier they were always thinking of going to Asia. So, overall, for the glass- lined business in Europe in Thaletec, we see the long-term trend being that more investment is coming and for pharma it’s good in India and the tariffs are also giving us an overall positive outlook.”
— Harsh Patel (Executive Director)
GMM Pfaudler
Similar hope GMM is having of the revival of capex post across the globe
“Looking ahead, we are optimistic however, the India business continues to do quite well, and we are in a strong position to deliver growth in both revenues and margins. Our international business has a good starting backlog. However, the current situation with the US, the tariffs, also the uncertainty surrounding investment that may have some impact on our international business. In conclusion, this year has been a transition year for us, we are focused on improvement programs internally as I mentioned two sites have been shut down. We have run a transformation program here in India, and as the market seems to be turning a little bit, we hope that some of the new kind of volume will help us also achieve some of the improvements for the next financial year.”
— Tarak Patel (MD)
Order Book being stagnant from past 3 years
“ Sure, so 2022 obviously was the time after COVID, where things were booming. Our focus to grow our service revenue continues, this year the service order intake has probably been below our expectations, but currently in terms of the pipeline and the focus in terms of growing our services business is on track. We do feel at some point, and especially last year, because of the slowdown, general slowdown in the industry, both capital equipment in terms of new capex as well as services across our client base did reduce. We now have some kind of hope that maybe in the coming years, these services revenues will increase. The idea is to continue to be close to the customers and make sure that we don't lose service business. And that's something that across all our locations we are trying to obviously grow. The services business especially was lower in the US, but we do expect some recovery to come at some point. But in India, we have also seen a slight slowdown in services, which is a general trend now across the world. However, product service is a very important portion of our overall order intake, and it continues to be a focus area for us to come back to the levels that we had in 2022. Thomas, if you would like to add or say as well.
Edelweiss Financial Services
The 3 year transition now coming to end and now transitioning to become more of a HoldCo than a conglomerate
“Over the last 3 years, we have changed our architecture. We have pivoted to becoming more of an investment company. And instead of a conglomerate, we now have very robust underlying stand-alone independent businesses that we've been able to scale up and build. So our first priority was always last 3 years growth and value creation in the underlying business. Priority number 2 was to reduce the overall debt, and third was the reduce of wholesale book, which, as you know, we exited the wholesale credit business, but the legacy book was there, which we have been wanting to scale down, and we have made considerable progress on that.”
— Rashesh Shah (Chairman)
Increasing competition in AMC industry and Radhika Gupta’s Take on the same
“I think the mutual fund industry has always been competitive. And I do foresee an increase in the number of mutual fund players that are out there in the market, but I think it's always been a competitive place. In terms of our differentiators, I would say 3 very, very clear ones. One, we, as an AMC, have been very focused on product innovation bringing first of its kind products to the market, and that has really worked in helping us build a hook with distributors and investors. If you look at other bonds or the whole target maturity suite of ETFs, one of the first and largest teams to do factor-based investing, one of the first AMCs to be large in the space of international funds, I think product innovation in each category continues to be a differentiator.
The second is the platform that we have. Unlike most asset managers, where there's an equity and fixed income platform, we have a 3-prong platform, traditional long-only investing, factor- based investing, which now other asset managers are investing in, but we've been doing for the last 10, 12 years and fixed income. And across all 3 unlike many boutique AMCs which focus on 1 niche -- we actually have products and track record across all these 3 capabilities.
And third is the engagement that we focus on with distribution. So one of the reasons our
distribution reach has grown is the amount of ground effort and ground engagement that we do with each of our channel partners in terms of training, education content, continuing on social media. So I think these are the things that give us continued competitive strength and opportunity to increase market share in this business.”
— Radhika Gupta (MD and CEO - EDELWEISS ASSET MANAGEMENT LIMITED)
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Vertiv (NYSE: VRT)
Intense Focus on Speed and Execution as a Competitive Advantage
"Vertiv's management team has an intense focus on speed and strong execution and that is amplifying our competitive advantages in this fast growing market".... "by the speed of execution and the rigor of execution that team Vertiv is displaying in handling the changing conditions"
Shaping the Market Evolution, Not Just Participating
Vertiv sees itself as an active force in the digital revolution, particularly in AI infrastructure. Gio Albertazzi articulates their ambition beyond being a market participant, especially with their collaboration with NVIDIA: "We are delivering the technology that enables the future generations of AI. We are helping our customers to stay one or more GPU generations ahead... we're not just participating in the market evolution we are actively shaping it"
Raymond (IR Day call)
History of how Raymond became from a complicated conglomerate to a 3 simple listed businesses
“Raymond started in 1925 as a textile company, and over the last 10 decades, exactly
because this year Raymond will be a hundred-year-old company. I think the 18th company in India that will be a hundred years old, and tomorrow, being a historic day, we are going to demerge the real estate business from the engineering business. We've seen lots of ups. We've seen lots of downs, and post-covid when we were right at the bottom, decided that we're going to do a lot of corporate actions and one of them being creating 3 separate listed companies for 3 separate businesses. Primarily lifestyle, real estate and engineering & auto. As per our commitment. We also committed that in 2025. we'll be debt-free, which we accomplished in 2023, and we successfully entered the real estate business, we got the lifestyle business demerged last year, which also got listed. We then immediately said that we will do the real estate demerger, which is happening now, and tomorrow is the record
date. So, tomorrow Raymond will go ex - real estate and in about 45 days we expect the real estate business to list.”
— Gautam Hari Singhania (Chairman)
Building an auto and aero/defense precision engineering business is incredibly complex.
“So, we started exporting way back in 1984 to Bosch and we started with a product called lapping mandrels. And just to give you an idea, lapping mandrels were very high precision parts that used to make the precision boards in fuel injection, which is very critical, as we all know it, there was no process called honing at that time which is there today. Now, as a consequence, we were making one-micron mandrels, and just to help you understand what one micron is. Your hair is between 40 and 60 microns depending on how old you are. But imagine splitting your hair 40 times or 60 times vertically.”
— Gautam Maini
Astra Microwave
Having an order book close to 1.8x of current revenue for the company
“Overall, our stand-alone order book of about INR1,951 crores consists of 91% of domestic
orders, primarily build to spec and 9% export orders, which include both BTP and BTS business. Moreover, our consolidated order book includes service orders valued at about INR150 crores, which are typically more accretive to margins. Apart from regular orders, during the quarter, we have received orders for AAAU for LCA Mark 2 and Su-30, which have significant business potential in the years to come. As of March 2025, our consolidated order book stood at about INR2,304 crores.”
— SG Reddy
Record margin expansion on product-mix
“We have witnessed significant growth in our gross profit margins, which stood at 43.9% for financial year ’25 as against 39% for financial year ’24. We have also seen good expansion in our EBITDA and PAT margins. This improvement is directly related to the product mix where we have continued to see healthy execution of domestic orders with a tilt towards the defense segment.”
Prudent capex plan to deepen testing & capacity
“In terms of capital expenditure, we have budgeted to spend about INR 45 crores for purchase of various test equipment to augment existing operations and another INR 45 crores for building additional space at our production unit to take care of expected load in the coming years. This capex will be met out of internal accruals and term loans from the bankers.”
Ambitious FY26 growth targets
“In the end, I would like to share with you, we are aiming to grow our top line at around 20% with a bottom line of about 18% with an order book target of about INR 1,400 crores for the financial year FY ’26.”
Sansera Engineering
Record top-line milestone and industry outperformance
“For the fiscal year 2025, Sansera Engineering crossed INR 30,000 million mark in terms of top line with a 7% revenue growth on a year-on-year basis. This is our highest ever annual and quarterly performance in terms of top line and PAT. With this performance, we continue to outperform the industry growth despite multiple headwinds in the Indian as well as global economy.”
Doubling ADS revenues in FY 26
“Looking ahead, the outlook for our business remains strong with multiple growth levers across the segments, particularly ADS, where we expect to double the revenue in the year FY ’26.”
Nelcast
Looking for a strong Fy26 as the cycle turns for the company
“Looking ahead, the company is seeing promising signs, and we believe that the growth
momentum will continue, leading to a strong year ahead. Our confidence is supported by a robust order pipeline for value-added products, which will drive growth and enhance profitability, bringing us closer to our goal of achieving the EBITDA/kg of INR15 a kg. Many of the new products will be produced at the Pedapariya facility, which will significantly improve our utilization in FY '26 and further enhancing our return ratios in the future.”
— P. Deepak
Increasing the value added mix for the company
“So I think there's very different ways of defining value-added product in terms of the
complexity of the products that we are doing. I would say that it's not a binary thing where you say something is value-added and something is not. It's a scale. Some are slightly complex; some are incredibly complex. So, I think it's more about just an overall move towards the more complex parts. And we see that happening in two ways. One with the new business that we are winning, both for the domestic and the export sector. But the second is also the existing products as the customers are trying to optimize the designs, some of the existing products, which might not be as complex are getting one or two levels higher up on that complexity scale as they are trying to optimize the design, which I think is a big advantage for us.”
— P. Deepak
Conclusion
As we wrap up this 13th edition of Investor's Edge, it's clear that the business landscape is brimming with dynamic shifts and promising opportunities. From the potential turnaround in European demand for Swiss watches, to India's burgeoning CAPEX cycle, and the strategic pivots of financial conglomerates, the insights from Q4 FY25 concalls offer a compelling glimpse into the future. The intense focus on speed and execution, and the ambitious growth targets set by companies like Vertiv, Astra Microwave, and Sansera Engineering, underscore a resilient and forward-looking corporate environment. We hope these curated observations have provided you with an "Investors' Edge" in navigating the evolving world of industries. We will be back with more such insightful analyses to keep you ahead of the curve.
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