NEW HORIZONS
The year 1997 holds tremendous significance in the journey of Nashik headquartered Ashoka Buildcon. That year it graduated from being a pure EPC player and became a developer with its first ever BOT (Build, Own, Transfer) project - a new concept back then. It was the 5 km Dhule bypass in Maharashtra and the project cost was just ` 5 crore. Ashoka Buildcon’s Managing Director Satish Parakh calls it “an early experimental thing that the company wanted to opt for”. The company was driven by the enthusiasm of the then state public works department minister and now the Union Road Transport and Highway Minister Nitin Gadkari, who was trying to promote BOT projects in Maharashtra. It has not looked back since then. Today, Ashoka Buildcon has 29 BOT projects, of which 27 have been completed. The key strength of the company, he says, lies in the fact that it was born as an EPC company and later graduated to becoming a developer. “Our USP is that we have complete control over the entire value chain,” says Parakh. Around 70 per cent of the revenue is from roads and about 30 per cent from power.
Today, the company is present across 16 states. Its total consolidated debt is, “in proportion to the around `10,000 crore assets that the company owns,” according to Parakh.
A new generation is now actively involved at Ashoka Buildcon, such as founder and Chairman Ashok Katariya’s son Ashish and Parakh’s son Aditya, and they are aggressively pushing growth. The company is now evaluating growth in new verticals such as real estate (it already has bagged a project from Mumbai International Airport Limited) and city gas distribution for domestic, transportation and industrial use. “In another three years we should comfortably be double the size of the company (the consolidated income from operations was `2979 crore in March 2017),” says Parakh. ~