 "Jaguar Land Rover, JLR, Tata Motors")
BENGALURU (Reuters) -India's Tata Motors Ltd expects its luxury car group, Jaguar Land Rover's (JLR) free cash flow to nearly quadruple to top $2.50 billion this fiscal, and the automaker also declared its first dividend in nearly seven years.
The automaker, India's No.1 by revenue, also posted a record high quarterly revenue and its second straight quarterly profit, helped by price hikes and strong demand for JLR cars as well as for its commercial trucks.
The profit of 54.08 billion rupees (about $661 million) for the January to March quarter also beat analysts expectations of 38.72 billion rupees, according to Refinitiv IBES data.
Tata Motors expects the JLR unit-which had previously reported a jump in quarterly sales on demand for its more profitable Range Rover SUVs-to post free cash flow of over 2 billion pounds ($2.52 billion) in fiscal 2024, compared with 521 million pounds in the fiscal year ended March 31.
The company said it expects JLR's supply chain, which has been plagued by delayed supply of parts such as semiconductors, to stabilise and forecast the unit's EBIT (earnings before interest and taxes) margin would top 6% in fiscal 2024, more than double the 2.4% it reported in fiscal 2023.
Tata Motors has raised prices across models to cope with rising input costs. Despite that, consumers lapped up sport utility vehicles (SUVs), while demand for trucks surged ahead of the introduction of stricter emission norms.
That propelled its overall consolidated revenue 35% higher to a record 1.06 trillion rupees, of which British automaker JLR accounted for about 67%.
Revenue from commercial vehicles, Tata's second-largest business, grew 14.6%, while sales of passenger vehicles grew 15.3%.
The company also declared a dividend of 2 rupees per share.
The stock hit a new 52-week high of 520.50 rupees earlier on Friday, before closing up with a 0.85% gain ahead of the results. ($1 = 81.7800 Indian rupees) ($1 = 0.7923 pounds)
(Reporting by Nandan Mandayam in Bengaluru; Editing by Savio D'Souza)
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