‘The Defence Segment Remains BEL's Main Business'

Bharat Electronics (BEL) CMD M.V. Gowtama shares with BW’s Manish Kumar Jha the company’s ambitious growth plans, how it has managed to touch the Rs 10,000-crore revenue mark and why exports and offsets are BEL’s thrust areas. Excerpts:

- Manish Kumar Jha

BEL’s turnover touched the Rs 10,000-crore mark for fiscal 201718, registering 14 per cent annual growth. What is the growth story?

Bharat Electronics has achieved the landmark turnover of more than Rs 10,000 crore (provisional and unaudited) during the financial year 2017-18, registering a growth of 14 per cent over the previous year’s turnover of Rs 8,825 crore.

Some of the flagship projects executed during the year include Integrated Air Command & Control System, Weapon Locating Radar, Hand Held Thermal Imager, Akash Weapon System for Army, Naval Fire Control System and Schilka.

BEL owes this achievement to the commitment and dedication of all its employees, esteemed customers, inspection agencies, the Ministry of Defence, DRDO labs, partners, suppliers and all other stakeholders who contributed to this milestone.

BEL was recently given the Best R&D Innovation Award among the leading Indian PSUs. Could you elaborate on your research programmes and spends?

R&D has been the main focus area of our company for increasing indigenisation and value addition in our products / systems. The total expenditure on R&D as a percentage of turnover during the year was 9.8 per cent, which is one of the highest among the defence PSUs. It is our constant effort on indigenous development that has led us to achieve 89 per cent of our turnover from indigenous products. Only 11 per cent of our revenues came from products manufactured through ToT from foreign OEMs.