Tejas Networks Ltd.

Tejas Networks Ltd.

407.70
INR
-16.20
(-3.82%)
-45.35EPS
110.87BMarket Cap
Jan 20Next Earn

Q4 FY2026 · Earnings Call TranscriptApril 15, 2026

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, good day and welcome to the Tejas Networks Limited Q4 FY26 earnings conference call hosted by ICICI Securities Limited. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen-only mode, and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes.

Should you need assistance during the conference call, please signal an operator by pressing star and then zero on your touchtone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded.

I now hand the conference over to Mr. Mohit Mishra from ICICI Securities Limited.

Thank you, and over to you, sir.

Mohit Mishra

Thank you. Good evening, everyone.

Thank you for joining on the Q4 FY26 results conference call of Tejas Networks Limited. We have the management with us of Tejas Networks on this call represented by Mr.

Arnob Roy, Executive Director and COO; Mr. Sumit Dhingra, CFO; Dr.

Kumar N. Sivarajan, CTO; and Mr.

Sanjay Malik, Chief Business and Strategy Officer. I would like to invite Mr.

Arnob Roy to initiate with opening remarks, post which we will have a Q&A session. Thank you, and over to you, sir.

Arnob Roy

Yeah. Thank you, Mohit.

Good evening and welcome everyone to our quarterly earnings call presentation. At the outset let me sincerely apologize for the delay.

We have a delay of an hour. We had a lot of technical problems uploading the materials to the SEBI site and that largely caused the delay.

I once again profusely apologize for the delays for the start of the conference. Let me begin by walking you through the Q4 financial numbers.

In Q4, we had revenue of ₹333 crore as opposed to ₹307 crore in Q3, and for the year, we had revenues of ₹1,103 crore. We had a net PAT loss of ₹211 crore in Q4 as opposed to ₹197 crore of PAT loss in Q3, and for the entire year, we had a PAT loss of ₹909 crore.

We had a growth in order book at the end of Q4. We ended with ₹1,514 crore at the end of Q4 as opposed to ₹1,090 crore at the end of Q4 of FY25.

From our revenue mix, India once again dominated our business: 88% India, and from order book also, it was very similar where dominated by the India business as far as bookings are concerned. Even though we made initial wireless business with customers, our revenue was driven largely by the sale of wireline products to India private and international customers.

As I mentioned, we had a significant order book year-on-year growth. I would like to now hand you over to our CFO, Sumit, for taking you through the financial numbers in detail.

Sumit Dhingra

Good evening, everyone. The revenue for the quarter four was ₹333 crore compared to ₹307 crore in the previous quarter, a quarter-on-quarter growth of 8%.

EBIT for the quarter was negative ₹219 crore as against ₹239 crore in the previous quarter. Profit after tax was ₹211 crore compared to ₹197 [crore?]

in the previous quarter. The full-year revenue was ₹1,103 crore, and profit after tax was negative ₹909 crore.

Inventory at the end of the quarter stood at ₹2,438 crore compared to ₹2,363 crore in the previous quarter. Receivables at ₹3,258 crore and payables at ₹478 crore.

The cash position at the end of the quarter was ₹505 crore, and a net debt of ₹3,531 crore. At gross level, the borrowings were ₹4,035 crore at the end of the quarter.

At that, I'll ask Arnob to take over the next few slides.

Arnob Roy

Thank you, Sumit. I'd like to add some color to the business that has happened over Q4 and also have a review of of our business during the year.

During the during the quarter, some of the significant things that happened in our wireless business was signing an agreement with NEC to to manufacture and supply our 5G Massive MIMO radios for a global customer. The other significant thing was we received an initial order for the expansion of 4G networks for a customer in South Asia.

We have multiple ongoing field trials for our 4G and 5G RAN products across South Asia and the Americas, and we recently successfully completed a 5G POC in in South America. For our wireline business, in the quarter, we completed the shipment of a significant number of IP/MPLS routers to BharatNet Phase 3.

As we are the largest suppliers in terms of number of circles for BharatNet Phase 3, and significant amount of shipment, and and many of them, several sites are now carrying live traffic. We supplied major amount of 100G and 400G DWDM systems to a Tier 1 telco in India for their 5G backhaul network, for their enterprise services, and also for their services for hyperscaler data center connectivity.

We were selected to build, a nationwide network, a multi-terabit DWDM network, for a hyperscaler data center application in India. It was a proud moment for us for for a very famous global sporting event.

We implemented the backbone network of a, multicountry network for this event using our state-of-the-art DWDM network. This was a global sporting event which happened recently.

Other highlights during the year: our products got recognized at ET Telecom for our innovative satellite Satcom IoT solution, and we also won the prestigious Golden Peacock Awards for our 5G RAN solutions. We launched our state-of-the-art ultracompact and hyperscalable data center interconnect product at MWC, Mobile World Congress, in Barcelona.

It was launched by the Honorable Minister of Communications. We filed 63 patents in in Q4, bringing the cumulative count to 673, out of which 371 have been granted.

We also received PLI incentives for FY25 of an additional ₹69 crore, reaching a total of ₹467 crore for FY25. A few corporate updates: for the year, we had some changes at the board as well as our senior management.

We appointed Mr. Shivkumar Viswanathan as additional director, non-executive and independent director of the company, with effect from April 15th, subject to the approval of shareholders.

Mr. Shivkumar is a chartered accountant with over 40 years of experience covering audit and assurance services, including eight years as COO at Deloitte.

Mr. P.

R. Ramesh, who was an independent director of the company, resigned effective closing business hours of April 18th, and Mr.

Shivkumar has taken over his spot as the independent director of the company. I have been appointed as the executive I was I am currently the executive director and chief operating officer, but have been appointed as the managing director and CEO of the company from effective today till 2028, and this is subject to the approvals of the shareholders of the company.

Few more updates: Mr. Preetam Uthappa, who is currently the Vice President of Product Line Management of the company, has been appointed as the Chief Operating Officer of the company with effect from today.

Mr. A.

V. S.

Prasad, who is currently the Financial Controller of Tejas, has been appointed as the Chief Financial Officer of the company with effect from 16th of May. Mr.

Sumit Dhingra, our current CFO, has resigned from the services of the company, but it will be effective from the close of business hours on May 15th. A quick review of the of FY26: so this year has been a year of consolidation for us.

A lot of the technology and products that we developed over the last three, four years achieved commercial scale and deployment at a global scale. The BSNL 4G/5G network went live across 100,000 sites and was launched by the Honorable Prime Minister in in 2025.

We deployed our largest indigenous router networks in the country through the BSNL 4G backhaul network, or the MAAN network, as well as in for the BharatNet Phase 3 network. We did we had a very successful global rollout of our DWDM products with 400G and 800G wavelength services both in India as well as internationally.

We also continued the deployment of the world's largest satellite IoT network with our, the the vehicle tracking system solution. We continued the innovation journey with our new products and technology launches.

We launched our 64TR Massive MIMO radio, 5G radio, during IMC at Indian Mobile Congress and it was launched by the Honorable MOC. We launched our DWDM system, our C+L band capable DWDM system, which transmits about 76 terabits of data over a single pair of fiber.

That was launched during IMC by the Honorable Minister of State. We launched our cloud-native converged 4G/5G core also during the year, and it is undergoing trials at at multiple locations across the world, across multiple customer networks.

We at at in the MWC during the year last year, we launched our our hyperscalable data center interconnect platform, which over a very compact form factor launches over 50 terabits of data in a in a single footprint. We also talked about the patents filed during the year: 147 patents were filed in FY26, and more than 150 contributions to the 3GPP standards, the evolving 3GPP standards.

Last year, we had announced strategic partnerships with NEC and Rakuten, and in the last financial year, we kind of went, developed these partnerships further. After we signed our first contract for the supply of Massive MIMO radios with NEC for an international deployment, and with Rakuten Symphony, we have partnered with Open RAN solutions, and we have multiple ongoing POCs across the world, and one of them was completed successfully very recently.

A significant achievement was the expanding our wireless footprint both in India as well as internationally. We covered new geographies, and the two deals we talked about are the 5G Massive MIMO radio for the global customer and the Open RAN deployments.

We also signed up several new applications. We did successful POCs for 5G private networks and also the 5G RAN pilot for the for the Kavach network.

Looking forward from a future business outlook, one of the we see that AI is going to be one of the driving, one of the killer applications which are going to drive the mega trends for network transformation both in terms of the traffic in the network as well as transformation of the network architecture. With the rapid adoption of AI applications, by 2023, AI traffic is predicted to be more than 60% of the total network that will be running in the traffic.

We'll have more than 100 million physical AI machines connected to the network by 2035. The profile of traffic is going to change dramatically from the today's downstream heavy traffic to upstream traffic where upstream traffic will outpace the downstream traffic networks, the traffic that is of today, and that will require significant network transformation.

Most enterprises will adopt AI heavily with the running GenAI workloads of the cloud, and this is also going to drive, from the traditional compute cloud-based traffic that is that the access is going to get transformed to an AI-based access from the cloud. With this trend, the AI this is going to drive a network infrastructure build supercycle, and that basically means that the current communication service provider networks, CSP networks, will not be sufficient to handle the traffic growth in the in the coming years.

The other the transformation that will happen is that close to 50% of the new AI traffic will be processed at the edge nodes where edge inferencing is going to play a big role in the architecture of of the global AI networks. There will be significant investments in new networks with 400G, 800G connectivity even at the access and at the edge to cater to the significant traffic growth.

AI is also expected to accelerate the adoption of 6G, and AI technology will be natively embedded in in the RAN and edge and core of the network. From a business impact, we see a lot of the convergence of not only access and backhaul, but also it will converge with compute at the network edge to support the edge AI infrastructure and the edge inferencing workloads in the network.

There will be significant scaling up of our optical solutions and packet switching and routing and converging with the with the edge compute in in the in the edge and access networks. The the data center connectivity will go to multi-terabit scale, which is already scaling up to that level, but is going to scale up significantly to provide for the AI cloud interconnect.

We have built our current platforms to which will scale very efficiently for the networks of the future to handle the traffic capacities as well as the traffic characteristics of future networks. Our new generation 5G products have been designed to to scale and evolve into 5G-Advanced and 6G products with higher uplink supporting much higher uplink capacities.

Our high-capacity optical, which supports 1.2 terabit per channel, is going to scale to 1.6 terabit and beyond to support the terabit-scale data center connectivity of the future. Our our edge multi-terabit edge node is going to again scale in capacity and interface, and also going to integrate with compute, capacity and compute infrastructure to support edge AI applications.

Our next-generation access will evolve supporting further convergence of wireless and wireline access solutions. AI will drive will be adopted in our network management all across for driving automation, for driving network management, and fault prediction, and network configuration, and driving a huge amount of automation and optimization of the of the network.

The key takeaways for FY26 that it has been a year of consolidation and transformation for us. We did our technology that we have developed in the past reached commercial scale of deployment in in in very large networks.

We expanded our portfolio significantly and launched several state-of-the-art products in wireless and wireline. We had several international wireless wins, they were they were starting point of our international expansion for wireless business, and we made progress with the initial strategic partnerships that we had that we had launched with our with several global partners.

We are well positioned for long-term success. From an industry point of view, we see AI that will drive a lot of demand for network build-out and as well as for our equipment as well.

We have a broader product roadmap which is well positioned to leverage the future opportunities that we see. We have strong partnerships in place to expand our our global customer footprint.

Before I end the presentation, I do want to make a few comments about about our financial results in FY26. As we mentioned, it has been a year of transition for us after the execution of the massive BSNL project in FY25, which did give us a significant amount of revenues.

We needed a runway in FY26 to consolidate and transition our business beyond BSNL. Several large customer projects that we were actually planning for, both for wireline and wireless products, have got delayed, which resulted in a significant revenue shortfall and the resulting financial loss.

However, we have not we had not cut down on the investments during the year because of our outlook for the future and and and the industry trend that we see. Based on our FY27 business outlook, we believe that with our with our current investments and cost structures, we will be able to achieve better financial results.

Net-net, while it has been a tough year for us business-wise, much has been achieved to set us on a path for the future. With that, I come to an end to our introductory remarks and open the floor for Q&A.

Operator

Thank you very much. We will now begin the question and answer session.

Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and then one on their touchtone phone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two.

Participants are requested to use handsets while asking a question. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles.

Again, to register for a question, please press star and then one. Our first question comes from the line of Shailesh Jahagirdar from Invest Yanya.

Please go ahead.

Shailesh Jahagirdar

Hi, am I audible?

Arnob Roy

Yes, you're audible, Shailesh.

Shailesh Jahagirdar

My question is that in February, we got a Massive MIMO deal for a Massive MIMO deal for 5G networks, and also a 4G network a deal for 4G network in South Asia. Is there any data for quantify these orders or deal so that we can consider the future outlook of this deal, how how it will affect the revenue and overall financials, and the timeline of this project?

Arnob Roy

Shailesh, typically we do not go into specific deal numbers and all, but a lot of the 5G Massive MIMO business will actually get revenued over this current financial year in FY27. Some of the revenue of the 4G deal happened in the past financial year, and we expect more expansion on that during the current financial year.

Beyond that, we do not share any deal-specific numbers for any project.

Shailesh Jahagirdar

Okay. My second question was the BSNL additional PO of 18,000 sites or around it.

The same PO is delayed, and is there any update on that?

Sanjay Malik

This is Sanjay Malik here. Thanks for this question.

Yes, it is the same add-on PO which has been there. The active discussions are still going on with the BSNL team on the sites on which they have to have these 4G sites and the configurations.

That discussion has been happening, and quite active discussion. We are still keeping our inventory here for delivering these sites in a quick turnaround once we get the PO, but yeah, as of now the discussions are definitely on.

Shailesh Jahagirdar

Just to add on, we have inventory, the timeline for that order will be pretty much less than the previous BSNL order, right?

Sanjay Malik

Sorry?

Shailesh Jahagirdar

We have the inventory for the upcoming PO for BSNL, I just want to ask that the timeline will be much lesser than previous PO?

Sanjay Malik

That's right. Because one thing is that now the sites are commercial, it's already tested out.

Once we receive the order, we have the inventory, definitely the delivery time would be much faster.

Shailesh Jahagirdar

Okay. Thank you.

That's all from myself.

Arnob Roy

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Pranav Kshatriya from Emkay.

Please go ahead.

Pranav Kshatriya

Hi. Thank you for the opportunity.

My first question is regarding the order book. This ₹1,500-odd crore order book, you said almost 83% of that is coming from the India business.

Does that include the BSNL 4G project as well?

Arnob Roy

No, it does not include the BSNL 4G project.

Pranav Kshatriya

This is purely BharatNet and other private telco whatever you might have?

Arnob Roy

Yes. This is our customers both in India as well as international for our wireline and wireless business, but doesn't include the BSNL 4G add-on.

Pranav Kshatriya

Should we assume that most of this will be sort of executable in this year itself, and hence potentially the revenue should be somewhat similar, if not higher than this number? I'm asking directionally, not the exact number.

Arnob Roy

A good portion of this will be revenued in this current financial year.

Pranav Kshatriya

Okay. Second question is regarding the cost of goods sold.

The memory prices have gone up. Does that impact margins for your product at all?

Arnob Roy

Yes, the cost of memory does impact the cost of our products. Even though it's a small component of our product cost, usually those are much smaller component compared to the much much more expensive Class A equipment that we use for network processing, for optics, and all those kind of things.

Yes, the cost and also the lead time is also a challenge for us. We are addressing this in multiple ways because there are new products, newer technologies that are out there, and we'll be addressing that, and also as a part of the increase, we are also renegotiating our prices with customers as well as for the new opportunities which are out there to make sure that we protect our margins.

Pranav Kshatriya

Okay. Because the purpose to ask this question was to understand how much should we expect the margin compression at a contribution margin level because it's not only the memory, even the chip prices have sort of inched up because that demand for chips have also been higher.

Can you give some qualitative or quantitative number that how much could be the impact on the margins?

Arnob Roy

As I said, if you ask specifically memory where the increase has been the largest, right? Other increases selectively have not been as dramatic as memory.

Thankfully, memory is only a very small portion, as it's high-volume component, even the cost of those that are not very high compared to the several thousand dollars of BOM cost, the cost that we have of our product, right? Upwards of many many thousands of dollars.

It's a very small component, but nevertheless, I think we are kind of making sure it is accounted in our cost and basically renegotiating and re-offering our new prices with the escalation to make sure that we protect our margins. The same holds for other cost escalations which are there, which are far more controlled, and also very controlled, by the way, in the sense that because we also have long-term pricing contracts with our suppliers also, right?

Those transitions happen very slowly, and we have the window of negotiating prices on any new deals that we sign to account for the cost escalation.

Pranav Kshatriya

Sir, last question from my side: since you're not giving any revenue guidance as such, last year you did give a revenue guidance, how should we look at the revenue growth for FY27 and margin given any quantitative or qualitative color will be helpful.

Arnob Roy

Yeah. Pranav, we've never given revenue or any other financial number guidance in the past, and so I think we will stick to that.

We are not in a position to give any new guidance. However, as I said, we have a stronger business outlook, and so I talked about that with all the investments that are made, and with our positive business outlook, we have continued the investments during the year, even though business didn't materialize, because we figured out that the investments in product evolution and building the new technologies was very important for our future business growth.

We continued on that. Obviously our outlook is positive, very positive for the future, and we expect to see growth, but as a practice, we've never quantified in terms of numbers.

Pranav Kshatriya

Thank you so much for all the answers. Wish you all the very best.

Arnob Roy

Thank you, Pranav. Yeah.

Operator

Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Ritesh Poladia from Girik Capital.

Please go ahead. Yeah.

Hi.

Ritesh Poladia

Thanks for the opportunity. Question is on balance sheet.

There's a good increase in intangibles under development from ₹400 to ₹950 crore. What does that pertain to?

Arnob Roy

Yeah. I think intangible under development commonly consists of our product development effort and also related to the IP or the technology license or the technology transfer that we did with NEC towards the end of the previous year.

That is partly getting reflected in the intangible under development.

Ritesh Poladia

That NEC investment was about ₹550-odd crore, everything has been done or still it is to be done?

Arnob Roy

A large part of it is done. I think it is linked to milestones, and I think balance milestones we expect to get done within the next one or two quarters.

With the commercialization of all the investments that we made, which are as part of the intangible assets, all of them will get capitalized as when we have commercial feasibility and commercial adoption of all the new technology and products that we've developed, including this licensing.

Ritesh Poladia

Sure. From that IP only you got this first order from NEC customer?

Arnob Roy

That was part of the agreement with NEC that we license some technology and we built radios for the future, okay?

Ritesh Poladia

Is it part of the same agreement where you got the first order, because your order book is ₹1,500 crore and 80% is India, so that would be very small amount, right?

Arnob Roy

Yeah. As I said, we've signed the contract for the supply, and so the revenue for that business will actually happen in FY27.

It is part of the same partnership, even though the two contracts are separate. The technology licensing contract and this supply contract are different completely.

Ritesh Poladia

Okay. When do we see the revenue from this technology agreement?

Arnob Roy

No, from this new contract with NEC, we'll see the revenue for that in FY27.

Ritesh Poladia

Okay. In

Arnob Roy

the current financial year.

Ritesh Poladia

Sure. Sir, as this bid comes bit complex, could you at least give us some sense that what amount of opportunities you are chasing right now, and by what time of this will get fructified or what are the milestones which we can look for it?

Arnob Roy

Again on this, definitely we have been chasing quite large opportunities, well, again from wireless perspective, quite a few of those are international opportunities, which we have built over last one year. If you would have seen that we have started quite a few trials also.

Again difficult to give the overall size of the funnel number, but it is substantial. Those will be getting again ordered in the coming year, and then yeah, revenue booking also should happen from that in the coming year.

Ritesh Poladia

Sure. I understand you are constrained in commenting further, but just to take it bit forward, will this opportunity be multiples of what you got in BSNL?

Arnob Roy

Multiples of what we got in BSNL? The original one, it would not be that 100,000 sites kind of thing, but because you know that numbers outside India are a little bit smaller as compared to BSNL.

I think from our product perspective, reference-building perspective, and coming to the international wireless area, I think that would be very very significant.

Ritesh Poladia

Sure. Regarding R&D spend for FY27, means is there any cutdown or you still going strong on your R&D investments, whatever you are looking for?

Arnob Roy

We will continue our R&D investments, but obviously we will tailor it to the business outlook that we have and how we see the business maturing. As I said, we will be optimizing it to make sure that we get much better financial results.

As of now, we plan to continue with our investments because the business outlook that we see in FY27 should be we should be able to achieve better financial results even with our current investments and cost structure. We will keep optimizing that as we see the business progress during the year.

Ritesh Poladia

Sure. One final question on receivables: where do we see this number going in FY27?

Arnob Roy

I think on receivables, two points, right? One is the number that you see needs to be looked at in context of the corresponding advance that we've received as part of the BSNL 4G order, which is currently showing up in current liabilities.

Having said that, we expect the remaining collections from BSNL to significantly happen during this current financial year. We expect the receivables to progressively come down over the next couple of quarters.

Obviously, this will also increasingly be a function of also the incremental business scale-up that happens over the next few quarters.

Ritesh Poladia

That I understand, but the entire BSNL 4G will be collected in this year?

Arnob Roy

A significant portion of that should get collected this year.

Ritesh Poladia

That's

Arnob Roy

again also linked to milestones, and those progressively are getting complete, we expect that to lead to collections over the next few quarters.

Ritesh Poladia

That's it from my side. Thank you very much, sir.

Operator

Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Avnish Kumar from Ritu Financial Services.

Please go ahead.

Avnish Kumar

Hello. Good evening.

Am I audible?

Arnob Roy

Yes.

Avnish Kumar

I had a complaint the timing for the concall was 7:15, and we started around 8:15. The presentation was out at 8:13 or 8:12, we didn't get any time to read or analyze the presentation before the concall.

This has been repeated for past seven, eight quarters. I requested four, five quarters earlier also that time should be given to the investors to analyze and read the report at least, but still the same story.

Arnob Roy

I think this time specially, we had a lot of problems in uploading, and that took a lot more time, we had to progressively delay. Again, once again, I apologize for that delay and the short window between the upload and the start of this call.

We'll make sure that it doesn't happen in the future.

Avnish Kumar

Thank you. Secondly, sir, congratulations on the patents that you have got in this quarter and the developments that you have got on the product side.

The presentation that you gave was too technical for a layman like me, it sounded like Greek and Latin for me. Whatever you said, congratulations for that.

As an investor, if we see the financials, I'm pretty disappointed with the way Tejas is going. I believe the shareholders' money is being taken for granted.

I do not see any progress in the financials. Even now, you're not able to give any kind of clarity on the future that we hold.

Pretty bad situation that we are in right now. Very disappointed.

Arnob Roy

I agree, Avnish. I think, of course, as part of the company's management, it's been disappointing for us also as well.

There were a lot of business that, as I mentioned, that we had planned for based on which we had made investments that got delayed. We think that after this BSNL project, this has been a year of transition for us, and going forward with everything that we have done and invested in, that we should be looking at a much more better and predictable financial results going forward.

Avnish Kumar

Sir, I just wanted to say, see, our share price has come down from the lifetime high of ₹1,495 to the range of ₹300 also. I understand that market forces are there that drive the share prices apart from the financials, but you should take care about the shareholders' money also, and some guidance should be given about the future.

This is just my recommendation. Rest, I leave up to your wisdom.

Arnob Roy

Sure. We'll take this into account.

Avnish Kumar

Thank you, boss. Thank you so much.

Operator

Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Pratap Maliwal from Mount Intra Finance Private Limited.

Please go ahead.

Pratap Maliwal

Hello. Hi.

Am I audible?

Arnob Roy

Yes, you're audible, Pratap.

Pratap Maliwal

Yeah. Hi, sir.

Thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to have a clarification regarding that earlier participant's question regarding the NEC deal for the supply of the Massive MIMO radio.

Is that part of our current order book of ₹1,500 crore or is that yet to come in, as you said that it will be revenued out in FY27? Is that already part of our order book?

Arnob Roy

For this deal, so that basically means that we are entering this account with NEC. There is the first PO which has been received, which is part of the ₹1,500 crore, and as we go along, there would be, yeah, the purchase orders would come as the rollout progresses through the year.

Pratap Maliwal

Okay. Can you give us any idea of how we kind of understand that this will scale up because, no, as you are saying that the outlook for FY27 is that we'll get some better results because FY26 has been a year of transition.

Can you give us some idea on how this is expected to scale up?

Arnob Roy

You mean this particular deal or the overall business in general?

Pratap Maliwal

Both, sir. In particular the NEC deal, because as you're saying that we'll get some follow-on purchase orders as well, what can we expect the scalability to be?

Sanjay Malik

It all basically depends upon the rollout which the customer does. As the rollout happens, then, yeah, the new purchase orders keep coming.

Difficult to again give a number projection on it, but I would say I think the follow-on orders would be again better than whatever we have as of now. Okay.

Pratap Maliwal

Now just one thing: when I look at our FY26, we've had a PAT loss of approximately ₹900 crore. In FY27, as you're saying that it'll be a year of transition and we get better results, what is our path back to profitability?

Can you give us some understanding on that front?

Arnob Roy

I think we expect much better business in FY27 based on the opportunities that we see. With we will also manage our costs at the current level and optimize as required to make sure that we have our path to profitability, because, as I said, this has been a one-off year where business got delayed, but we didn't want to compromise on our investments for the future opportunities.

Going forward, I think we will ensure that one part of it is the business which is out there and our cost structure which is there, they are in line, and we do expect that from the business outlook that we see in FY27, we should end up with much better financial results. We'll also as the business progresses, we will monitor and optimize our costs accordingly.

Pratap Maliwal

Are we expecting to be PAT positive in FY27?

Arnob Roy

We don't give financial guidance, but yes, that's the goal.

Pratap Maliwal

Sir. Thanks for taking my question.

Operator

Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Darshil Jhaveri from Crown Capital.

Please go ahead.

Darshil Jhaveri

Hello. Good evening, sir.

Thank you so much for taking my question. Sir, as I understand you're not going to give any guidance, but with regards to just our inventories and receivables, so that's putting a serious strain on our balance sheet.

What is the company's aim regarding that? I understand even if I net off the other current liabilities for receivables, that still is nearly double the revenue than what we've done in FY26.

Just wanted to understand what do we expect out of this, and what has company modeled out if BSNL order is even delayed by another year, because that's not in our hands, right, sir? What is the inventory level?

Will there be deterioration? Will there be some other write-off that we need to take?

What do you feel is the realistic outlook that we can have with regards to our inventories and receivables, sir?

Sumit Dhingra

I think on receivables, I broadly clarified in response to the earlier question. We are expecting to get the balance collections from BSNL significantly during this year, and that should lead to improvement from a receivable standpoint.

On inventory also, I think as you alluded to, I think a large part of this is also coming from the advance procurement action that we took for the BSNL add-on order. Right now we continue to be in discussions with them with respect to getting the order, and the inventory here is something that gets used in the radios that we sell, and those can potentially also be sold to other customers.

I think so that's where it is. I think for now, I don't think we have any further clarity with respect to the BSNL add-on order.

Arnob Roy

See, the inventory for these products, the BSNL 4G products are not unique to BSNL. They are wide range of radios for 4G and 4G upgradable to 5G, which are applicable for customers for any kind of customers, right?

Many of the opportunities that we are positioning ourselves internationally in the private 4G networks and all those kind of things, they all use the same products. The inventory will also be used for many of those opportunities when they convert.

It's not very unique to BSNL. However, as you noted that most of it had been procured for BSNL, significant part of it will go along with BSNL add-on order, but independently, they will be consumed along with other business opportunities that we have globally.

Darshil Jhaveri

Okay. Fair enough, sir.

Just another question regarding our cash generation ability, sir. Even in the current year, I think we've been able to only generate around ₹135 crore of cash.

That takes in account of all the change in inventory, advances that we've gotten. On based of that, I think we have invested I think around ₹700 crore in intangible assets, right, sir?

Majorly if I'm not wrong, our investment in intangible is debt-funded. What is the rationale behind that, because I don't know if this is sustainable at a certain level, right, sir?

If we're not going to be PAT positive in FY27, yeah, we might be funding our intangibles with debt, but it will take time to get traction. We'll get orders, we'll get minute orders, but in that time, I don't want that our company's balance sheet deteriorated so much that we have bigger issues than research and development.

Any comments on that, sir?

Arnob Roy

No, I agree with your observation. The point is that since we are in the deep tech space, being in a situation where you don't invest in technology evolution is a bigger risk for the future of your business than the other way around, right?

From that point of view, in FY26, we took the call of that even with the business shortfall that we see, with the transition that is happening, and with the technology that we needed to develop to leverage the future, that we'll continue with our investment, and we have done that, and as you see, we have launched many products which will help us for the business of the future. I think going forward in FY27, as I said, the financial diligence of investments versus returns and revenues and all will be far more tighter because I believe the significant investment has gone in and we have achieved much of the goals that we had in mind.

In FY27 and beyond, it will be a much more well-balanced investment that will happen in line with the business outlook. Also which will continue to evolve and monitor very closely.

Darshil Jhaveri

Fair enough. Sir, just one last question from my end, sir.

Right now we are at around ₹1,500 crore of order book. If you may, sir, any kind of target of the order wins that we want, I'm not saying specifically for this year, maybe with the new technologies over a period of three years, what is the target that we can have in terms of order wins, because even if some kind of direction we can get in this, that would be really helpful, sir.

Arnob Roy

As I said, the investments have been made with an eye on significant growth, and this significant growth will be, of course, over year-over-year numbers, if you leave out the one-off BSNL project. Those kind of projects will come, and there will be spikes in our business when they happen.

If you look at the business trend without those one-off projects kind of thing, whatever you see, we will definitely, hopefully see business growth on top of what we have seen earlier in FY24 and so on. That's all I can say.

There is a significant growth in our opportunities. There will be a lot of investments happening from operators, from enterprises, from ISPs, and so on.

We are well positioned over there, obviously this investment has been made with a business which is several multiples of what we have done in FY26, right? That's basically the outlook based on which we have made all these investments.

Darshil Jhaveri

Okay. Fair enough, sir.

That's it from my side, sir. All the best.

Arnob Roy

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Shailesh Jahagirdar from Invest Yanya.

Please go ahead.

Shailesh Shah

Hi, sir. I was in queue again.

I had a question about data center connectivity business. TCS is actively building data centers, actively participating in data center building.

They have a plan of 1 GW, do we have a certain benefit of being a Tata Group company, and we can get an PO from TCS in somewhere? Do we have a benefit not in terms of amount, but in terms of being a group company?

That's what my question was.

Arnob Roy

Independent of being a group company, we are engaged with not only TCS, but other of this data center builders for our products. We have seen a lot of our success in optical has been as part of those data center build-outs.

TCS is yes, one of our important customers as well for that, for data center applications. Yes, we are closely engaged with them with their future business plans, but I like to highlight that they're not the only one for our data center business-related growth.

Shailesh Shah

Okay. Thank you.

That was my question.

Arnob Roy

Yeah.

Operator

Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Arpit Jain from Walfort Financial Services Limited.

Please go ahead.

Arpit Jain

Hello. Can you hear me?

Arnob Roy

Yes, we can hear you, Arpit.

Arpit Jain

Yeah. Hi.

Over the last year, we filed a couple of patents. I just wanted an idea regarding when do these patents generate revenue for us?

What is the rationale behind filing so many patents? What's the future outlook regarding these patents?

Arnob Roy

Yeah. See, as a deep tech company, we need to file patents: one is to protect our inventions so that our innovations are not replicated easily.

The second part of this is that especially in the wireless space, there is a lot of the patents that go into what are called the standard-essential patents. These are patents which are used for building as per the new standards of 5G or 5G-Advanced or 6G based on 3GPP standard evolution.

As a wireless company and also from our other business, we need this patent portfolio to be both from a point of protecting our innovations as well as a defensive portfolio where you would be cross-licensing patents from other companies which are absolutely essential in nature as far as developing your wireless products and technology are concerned. In summary, both in terms of protecting our innovations and also for giving us a solid base for being able to cross-license patents and technologies with other technology developers.

Arpit Jain

Okay.

Arnob Roy

This is more than a direct monetization of the number of patents that we have. It is monetization in a little indirect way.

Arpit Jain

Oh, okay. Thank you.

Arnob Roy

Yeah. We have time for one last question.

Operator

Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Rajakumar Vaidyanathan from RK Invest.

Please go ahead.

Rajakumar Vaidyanathan

Good evening. Can you hear me?

Arnob Roy

Yes, we can hear you.

Rajakumar Vaidyanathan

Thanks for the opportunity. Just couple of questions.

The first question is, is it reasonable to expect a break-even in FY27 and a PAT positive in FY28?

Arnob Roy

That's the goal. We've not give guidance, but that's clearly the goal.

As I said, FY26 has been a year of investment, and FY27, we expect to see far better financial results with the business outlook that we have, and with the investments and the expense control that we will have within the company, the expectation is that, yes, financial turnaround as quickly as possible, starting with FY27.

Rajakumar Vaidyanathan

Okay. The second question is on this elongated DSO that you have with the BSNL order.

Do you expect that elongated DSO even for the order that is under execution because you've still not collected more ₹3,000 crore, will the same issue will happen with the current order as well?

Arnob Roy

No, you're talking about the collections from the upcoming order, add-on order?

Rajakumar Vaidyanathan

There are two issues. Whatever the AR that is outstanding that you showed as of March 2026, that you said that you will be able to collect significantly in FY27.

My question is the order that you are executing, which is about ₹1,500 crore, the orders on hand that you mentioned, right? There also the DSO will be elongated DSO or there you expect the collections to happen much faster?

Arnob Roy

Two things. Number one, out of this ₹1,500 crore of order book, BSNL purchase order is still not part of that because, as we said, that we are still in discussion to get that into the purchase order.

Second, the collection for this should be faster than the original order because first time we kind of delivered the product, tested it, then there is acceptance testing, and then there is kind of rigorous testing against integration with their existing elements and all that. Those things will not be there when we go for this add-on PO.

Because these add-on POs would be same technology, similar products to be integrated or to be installed. The delivery time and installation time and acceptance time would be much faster.

Rajakumar Vaidyanathan

Okay. Got it, sir.

Sir, the last question is, can you give me what is the total headcount as of March '26 vis-à-vis March '25?

Arnob Roy

Total headcount is roughly about 2,300 employees, and that is broadly remained the same compared to the previous year.

Rajakumar Vaidyanathan

Okay. Thank you so much.

Operator

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, with this, I now hand the conference over to the management for closing comments.

Arnob Roy

Thank you, Mohit. Thanks, everyone, for attending the call and for all your questions.

Once again, my apologies for starting this an hour later than the scheduled time. Secondly, as you've seen the results of FY26, the key takeaway I want gentlemen to have is that, yes, the results have been quite disappointing, but at the same time, we are positive about our future based on which we have made substantial investments during the year to make sure our products are ready and technologically ready and capable for the business and the technology transitions that we see.

We look forward to a much better future, and with that mindset, the investments have been made, and hope to work with you all and connect with you all in future again, and deliver a much better FY27. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. On behalf of ICICI Securities Limited, that concludes this conference.

Thank you all for joining us, and you may now disconnect your lines.