L&T shares in focus after management says will beat order inflow guidance, but concerns remain

Shares of engineering and infrastructure conglomerate Larsen & Toubro Ltd

. (L&T) will be in focus on Thursday, January 29, after the management maintained its full-year guidance across parameters, but also said that it will exceed its order inflow growth guidance of 10% for the full year.

Besides this, the management maintained its revenue growth guidance of 15% and the core margin guidance of 8.5% for the full year. Core margins at the end of the December quarter stood at 8.1%, an improvement of 40 basis points from last year.

L&T's net profit during the quarter was impacted due to a one-time labour code impact of ₹1,344 crore. Adjusted for that, the profit figure of ₹4,380 crore was higher than last year's figure.

For the quarter, L&T's Earnings Before Interest, Tax, Depreciation and Amortisation (EBITDA) for the quarter grew by 18.6% from last year to ₹7,416 crore, marginally higher than the CNBC-TV18 poll of ₹7,329 crore.

However, concerns continue for L&T across some business verticals. Execution challenges in the domestic water projects led to the company missing its revenue estimates for the quarter. Challenges have led to the company deliberately delaying execution in the water business.

Margins for the Hydrocarbon business were also subdued, mostly due to cost overruns in competitively priced projects.

Shares of Larsen & Toubro ended little changed on Wednesday at ₹3,796.9. The stock is down 6% in the last one month.