Larsen verticals to float IPOs soon

Larsen & Toubro (L&T), which is into 62 businesses, including heavy engineering and construction, has plans to take four of its five new verticals to the market. The company is likely to announce the first public issue next year.

A M Naik, chairman and managing director of L&T, said the details, such as the size of the funds required for each of these companies and proposed dilution of the equity, were yet to be worked out.

According to him, L&T Infotech will come out with a public issue in the next 12 to 18 months, while both the financial services and the infrastructure companies will line up their issues in two-and-a-half to three years.

The power engineering company, for which it has already entered into a strategic alliance with Mitsubishi with regard to boiler manufacturing and is expected to conclude a similar deal for turbine manufacturing in the next 3 to 4 weeks, will take as long as 5 years to raise funds through the public issue route.

Among other new initiatives, Naik said the location for the proposed Rs 2,000-crore shipbuilding project would be finalised in a month. Kakinada and Ennore on the east coast and Gujarat on the west coast are currently on the company's radar for this project.

L&T has a complex in-house strategy in place to scale up each of the 12 verticals, including the new ones, to a minimum of Rs 4,000 crore turnover level.

The company also aims to increase its manpower by 5,000 during the current year as a part of its long-term plan to more than double the number of employees to 75,000 by 2015 from the current 35,000, according to Naik.

Hoping to touch a combined turnover of Rs 25,000 crore during the current year from Rs 21,000 crore last year, Naik said L&T would be able to add Rs 5,000 crore each year till 2015.