Raymond Group bullish on growth prospects: CFO Sanjay Bahl

Diversified Raymond Group on January 24 said the company is aiming to monetise non-core assets to pare debt.

In an interview to CNBC-TV18, Sanjay Bahl, group chief financial officer, said the company has managed to withstand the costs pressure and all the businesses have done well ensuring an improvement in margins.

Bahl said Raymond saw a strong profitable growth in the last three quarters and that is continuing, "So going forward, with consumer demand and discretionary spends going up, the revenue growth would be intact."

On Q4 guidance, he said Raymond will grow revenues in high single digit, improve margins by 100 basis points and guidance for FY20 would come at end of Q4.

Talking about store expansion, he said in Q3, Raymond added about 97 stores and 95 of them franchise-led. Therefore, it was an asset-light expansion strategy. Overall, Raymond has added 209 stores this year.

According to Bahl, Raymond's Thane project has received Maharashtra RERA registration for phase I and the launch date would be in this quarter. The land is a part of Raymond's bigger, 125-acre land at Thane's Cadbury Junction.

Yesterday, Raymond reported an increase of 30 percent in consolidated net profit at Rs 39.95 crore for the third quarter ended December 2018. The company had posted a net profit of Rs 30.71 crore in October-December period a year ago, Raymond said in a BSE filing.

Total income during the reported period stood at Rs 1,705.68 crore, registering an increase of 12.69 percent from the December quarter of 2017-18. Raymond’s total expenses were at Rs 1,639.03 crore as against Rs 1,471.38 crore in the year-ago period.

Source: CNBC-TV18