MEET THE HIGH-FLYER IN INDIA'S DRONES CLUB

ideaForge has quickly become the biggest pure-play company in India's nascent drone manufacturing industry

- Leslie D'Monte

In the 2009 Bollywood movie 3 Idiots, Aamir Khan, who plays an engineering student named Rancho, guides a drone with four rotors to the window of a classmate’s hostel room and catches him unguarded… and unclad. The drone, technically known as an unmanned aerial vehicle or UAV, was an early vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) prototype manufactured by Mumbai-based startup ideaForge Technology.

The company has come a long way in the years since and is now India’s largest drone startup. It had an eye-popping initial public offering (IPO) in June, which was oversubscribed 106 times, with a 93% listing day gain on the BSE on 7 July. In the three months or so since the listing, however, the stock has been sliding steadily—ideaForge shares ended trading at ₹864 on 3 October, still above their IPO price of ₹672 per share, but well below the euphoric 52-week high of ₹1,344.

While extreme market swings sometimes make it hard to ascertain the true value of a company, ideaForge’s management is confident about what the future holds, as are analysts. Today, ideaForge is sitting tight with an overall order book of around ₹190 crore and is profitable. For the full year ended March, its revenue stood at ₹186 crore on a profit after tax (PAT) of ₹32 crore. Revenue for the April-June 2023 quarter stood at ₹97.1 crore as compared to ₹38.7 crore in the previous quarter, while its PAT stood at about ₹19 crore. In comparison, the only other listed drone company, DroneAcharya Aerial Innovations, posted revenue of ₹18.57 crore and a PAT of ₹3.43 crore.