Ladies and gentlemen, good day and welcome to the Tejas Networks Limited Q4 FY 2026 earnings conference call hosted by ICICI Securities Limited. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen-only mode, and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need assistance during the conference call, please signal an operator by pressing star and then zero on your touchtone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Mohit Mishra from ICICI Securities Limited. Thank you, and over to you, sir.
Yeah. Thank you. Good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining on the Q4 FY 2026 results conference call of Tejas Networks Limited. We have the management with us of Tejas Networks on this call, represented by Mr. Arnob Roy, Executive Director and COO, Mr. Sumit Dhingra, CFO, Dr. Kumar N. Sivarajan, CTO, and Mr. Sanjay Malik, Chief Business and Strategy Officer. I would like to invite Mr. Arnob Roy to initiate with opening remarks, after which we will have a Q&A session. Thank you, and over to you, Sir.
Yeah. Thank you, Mohit. Good evening, and welcome, everyone, to our quarterly earnings call presentation. At the outset, let me sincerely apologize for the delay. We have a delay of an hour. We had a lot of technical problems uploading the materials to the SEBI site, and that largely caused the delay. Once again, I sincerely apologize for the delays for the start of the conference. Let me begin by walking you through the Q4 financial numbers. In Q4, we had revenue of INR 333 crores as opposed to INR 307 crores in Q3. For the year, we had revenues of INR 1,103 crores. We had a net PAT loss of INR 211 crores in Q4, as opposed to INR 197 crores of PAT loss in Q3. For the entire year, we had a PAT loss of INR 909 crores.
We had a growth in order book at the end of Q4. We ended with INR 1,514 crores at the end of Q4 as opposed to INR 1,019 crores at the end of Q4 of FY25. So from a revenue mix, India once again dominated our business, 88% India. And from order book also it was very similar, where it was dominated by the India business as far as bookings are concerned. So even though we made initial business, wireless business with international customers, our quarter revenue was driven largely by the sale of wireline products to India private and international customers. And as I mentioned, we had a significant order book year-on-year growth. So I would like to now hand you over to our CFO, Sumit, for taking you through the financial numbers in detail.
Good evening, everyone. The revenue for the quarter four was INR 333 crores compared to INR 307 crores in the previous quarter. A quarter-on-quarter growth of 8%. EBIT for the quarter was -INR 219 crores as against INR 239 crores in the previous quarter. Profit After Tax was INR 211 crores compared to INR 197 in the previous quarter. The full year revenue was INR 1,103 crores and Profit After Tax of -INR 909 crores.
Inventory at the end of the quarter stood at INR 2,438 crores, compared to INR 2,363 crores in the previous quarter. Receivables at INR 3,258 crores, and payables at INR 478 crores. The cash position at the end of the quarter was INR 505 crores and a net debt of INR 3,531 crores. At gross level, the borrowings were INR 4,035 crores at the end of the quarter. I'll ask Arnob to take over the next few slides.
Thank you, Sumit. I'd like to add some color to the business that has happened over Q4 and also have a review of our business during the year. During the quarter, some of the significant things that happened in our wireless business was signing an agreement with NEC to manufacture and supply our 5G Massive MIMO radios for a global customer. The other significant thing was we received an initial order for the expansion of 4G networks from a customer in South Asia. We have multiple ongoing field trials for our 4G and 5G products across South Asia and the Americas. We recently successfully completed a 5G PoC in South America. For our wireline business, in the quarter we completed the shipment of a significant number of IP/MPLS routers to BharatNet phase III.
As you know, we are the largest suppliers in terms of number of circles for BharatNet phase III. A significant amount of shipment and several sites are now carrying live traffic. We supplied a major amount of 100G and 400G WDM systems to our tier-one telco in India for their 5G backhaul network, for their enterprise services, and also for their services for hyperscaler data center connectivity. We were selected to build a nationwide network, a multi-terabyte digital network for a hyperscaler data center application in India. It was a proud moment for us. For a very famous global sporting event, we implemented the backbone network of a multi-country network for this event, using our state-of-the-art WDM network. This was a global sporting event which happened recently.
Other highlights during the year, our product got recognized at ET Telecom for our innovative satellite Satcom IoT solution, and we also won the prestigious Golden Peacock Awards for our 5G RAN solutions. We launched our state-of-the-art ultra-compact and hyperscalable data center interconnect product at MWC, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. It was launched by the Honorable Minister of Communications. We filed 63 patents in Q4, bringing the cumulative counts to 676, out of which 371 have been granted. We also received PLI incentives for FY 2025 of an additional INR 69 crores, reaching a total of INR 467 crores for FY 2025. A few corporate updates for the year. We have some changes at the Board as well as our Senior Management. We appointed Mr. Srikumar Vijayasekaran as Additional Director, Non-Executive, and Independent Director of the company with effect from April 15th, subject to the approval of shareholders.
Mr. Srikumar is a chartered accountant with over 40 years of experience covering audit and assurance services, including eight years as COO at Deloitte. Mr. P R Ramesh, who was an Independent Director of the company, resigned and effective closing business hours of April 18th, and Mr. Srikumar has taken over his spot as the Independent Director of the company. I'm currently the Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer, but I have been appointed as the Managing Director and CEO of the company, effective today till 2028. This is subject to the approval of the shareholders of the company. Few more updates. Mr. Preetham Muthaiah, who is currently the Vice President of Product Line Management of the company, has been appointed as the Chief Operating Officer of the company with effect from today.
Mr. Abhishek Prasad, who is currently the Financial Controller of Tejas, has been appointed as the Chief Financial Officer of the company with effect from 16th of May. Mr. Sumit Dhingra, our current CFO, has resigned from the services of the company, but it will be effective from the close of business hours on May 15th. A quick review of FY 2026. This year has been a year of consolidation for us. A lot of the technology and products that we developed over the last three-four years achieved commercial scale and deployment at a global scale. The BSNL 4G-5G network went live across 100,000 sites and was launched by the Honorable Prime Minister in 2025. We deployed our largest indigenous router networks in the country through the BSNL 4G backhaul network or the MAN network, as well as for the BharatNet phase III networks.
We had a very successful global rollout of our WDM products with 400G and 800G WDM services, both in India as well as internationally. We also continued the deployment of the world's largest satellite IoT network with our vehicle tracking system solution. We continued the innovation journey with our new products and technology launches. We launched our 64T64R Massive MIMO radio, 5G radio, during IMC at India Mobile Congress, and it was launched by the Honorable MOC. We launched our WDM system, our C+L-band capable WDM system, which transmits over 76 Tb of data over a single pair of fiber. That was also launched during IMC by the Honorable Minister of State. We launched our cloud-native converged 4G/5G core also during the year, and it's undergoing trials at multiple locations across the world, across multiple customer networks.
At MWC during the year, last year, we launched our hyperscalable data center interconnect platform, which over a very compact form factor, launches over 50 Tb of data in a single footprint. We also talked about the patents filed during the year. 147 patents were filed in FY 2026, and more than 150 contributions to the 3GPP standards, the evolving 3GPP standards. Last year, we had announced strategic partnerships with NEC and Rakuten, and in the last financial year, we kind of developed these partnerships further. After we signed our first contract for the supply of Massive MIMO radios with NEC for an international deployment and with Rakuten Symphony, we have partnered with Open RAN solutions, and we have multiple ongoing POCs across the world, and one of them was completed successfully very recently.
A significant achievement was expanding our wireless footprint, both in India as well as internationally. We covered new geographies, and the two deals we talked about are the 5G Massive MIMO radio for the global customer and the Open RAN deployment. We also signed up several new applications. We did successful PoCs for 5G private networks and also the 5G RAN pilot for the coverage network. Looking forward to our future business outlook, we see that AI is going to be one of the killer applications which are going to drive the megatrends for a network transformation, both in terms of the traffic in the network as well as transformation of the network architecture.
With the rapid adoption of AI applications, by 2023, AI traffic is predicted to be more than 60% of the total network that will be running the traffic, will have more than 100 million physical AI machines connected to the network by 2035. The profile of traffic is going to change dramatically from today's downstream heavy traffic to upstream traffic, where upstream traffic will outpace the downstream traffic, the traffic that is up today, and that will require significant network transformation. Most enterprises will adopt AI heavily with running GenAI workloads off the cloud. This is also going to drive from the traditional compute cloud-based traffic, that is, let's say access is going to get transformed to an AI-based access from the cloud. With this trend, this is going to drive a network infrastructure-build super-cycle.
Which basically means that the current communication service provider networks, the CSP networks, will not be sufficient to handle the traffic growth in the coming years. The transformation that will happen is that close to 50% of the new AI traffic will be processed at the edge nodes, where edge inferencing is going to play a big role in the architecture of the global AI networks. There will be significant investments in new networks with 400G, 800G connectivity, even at the access and at the edge, to cater to the significant traffic growth. AI is also expected to accelerate the adoption of 6G and AI technology will be natively embedded in the RAN and edge and core of the network.
For business impact, we see a lot of the convergence of not only access and backhaul, but also it will converge with compute at the network edge to support the edge AI infrastructures and the edge inferencing workloads in the network. There will be significant scaling up of our optical solutions and packet switching and routing and converging with the edge compute in the edge and access networks. The data centers connectivity will go to multi-terabit scale, which is already scaling up to that level, but is going to scale up significantly to provide for the AI cloud interconnect. We have built our current platforms which will scale very efficiently for the networks of the future to handle the traffic capacities as well as the traffic characteristics of future networks.
Our new-generation 5G products are being designed to scale and evolve into 5G-Advanced and 6G products with supporting much higher uplink capacities. Our high-capacity optical, which supports 1.2 Tb per channel, is going to scale to 1.6 Tb and beyond to support the terabit-scale data center connectivity of the future. Our multi-terabit edge node is going to, again, scale in capacity and interface and also going to integrate with compute capacity and compute infrastructure to support Edge AI applications. Our next-generation access will evolve, supporting further convergence of wireless and wireline access solution. AI will be adopted in our network management all across for driving automation, for driving network management, and fault prediction, and network configuration, and driving a huge amount of automation and optimization of the network.
The key takeaways for FY 2026, that it has been a year of consolidation and transformation for us. We did our technology that we have developed in the past with commercial scale of deployment in very large networks. We expanded our portfolio significantly and launched several state-of-the-art products in wireless and wireline. We had several international wireless wins. They were the starting point of our international expansion for wireless business. We made progress with the initial strategic partnerships that we had launched with several global partners. We are well-positioned for long-term success. From an industry point of view, we see AI that will drive a lot of demand for network build-out and as well for our equipment as well. We have a broad product roadmap, which is well-positioned to leverage the future opportunities that we see.
We have strong partnerships in place to expand our global customer footprint. Before I end the presentation, I do want to make a few comments about the financial results in FY 2026. As we mentioned, it has been a year of transition for us after the execution of the massive BSNL project in FY 2025, which gave us a significant amount of revenues. We needed a runway in FY 2026 to consolidate and transition our business beyond BSNL. Several large customer projects that we were actually planning for, both for wireline and wireless products, have got delayed, which resulted in a significant revenue shortfall and the resulting financial loss. However, we have not cut down on the investments during the year because of our outlook for the future and the industry trends that we see.
Based on our FY 2027 business outlook, we believe that with our current investments and cost structures, we will be able to achieve better financial results. Net-net, while it has been a tough year for us business-wise, much has been achieved to set us on a path for the future. With that, I come to an end to our introductory remarks and open the floor for Q&A.
Thank you very much. We will now begin the question- and- answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and then one on their touch-tone phone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Participants are requested to use handsets while asking a question. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. Again, to register for a question, please press star and then one. Our first question comes from the line of Shailesh Jahagirdar from InvestYadnya. Please go ahead.
Hi, am I audible?
Yes, you're audible, Shailesh.
My question is that, in February, we got a Massive MIMO deal for 5G networks and also a deal for 4G network in South Asia. Is there any data for quantify these orders or deal so that we can consider the future outlook of this deal, how it will affect the revenue and the overall financials and the timeline of this project?
Yeah, Shailesh, typically, we do not go into specific deal numbers and all. A lot of the 5G Massive MIMO business will actually get revenued over this current financial year in FY 2027. Some of the revenue of the 4G deal happened in the past financial year, and we expect more expansion on that during the current financial year. Beyond that, we do not share any deal-specific numbers for any project.
Okay. My second question was the BSNL additional PO of 18,000 sites around. The same PO is delayed, or is there any update on that?
Yeah, this is Sanjay Malik. Thanks for this question. Yes, it is the same add-on PO which has been there. The active discussions are still going on with the BSNL team on the sites on which they have to have these 4G sites and the configurations. That discussion has been happening and quite active discussion. We are still keeping our inventory here for delivering these sites in a quick turnaround once we get the PO. As of now, the discussions are definitely on.
Just to add on, we have inventory. The timeline for that order will be pretty much less than the previous BSNL order spec.
Sorry?
We have the inventory for the upcoming PO for BSNL. I just want to ask that the timeline would be much lesser than previous PO?
That's right. Because one thing is that now the sites are commercial, so it's already tested out. Once we receive the order, we have the inventory, so definitely the delivery time would be much faster.
Okay, thank you. That's all from my side.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Pranav Kshatriya from Emkay Please go ahead.
Hi. Thank you for the call, Satish. My first question is regarding the order book. I mean, this INR 1,500 odd crore order book, you said almost 83% of that is coming from the India business. Does that include the BSNL 4G project as well?
No, this does not include the BSNL 4G project.
This is purely BharatNet and other private telco, whatever you might have.
Yes. It's our customers, both in India as well as international, for our wireline and wireless business, but doesn't include the BSNL 4G at all.
Should we assume that most of this will be sort of executable in this year itself, and hence, potentially the revenue should be somewhat similar, if not higher than this number? I'm asking the direction and not the exact number.
Yeah, a good portion of this will be revenued in this current financial year.
Okay. Second question is regarding the cost of goods sold. The memory prices have gone up. Does that impact the margins for your product at all?
Yes. The cost of memory does impact the cost of our products. Even though it's a small component of our product cost, usually those are much smaller compared to the much more expensive Class A equipment that we use for network processing, for optics and all those kind of things. Yes, the cost and also the lead time is also a challenge for us, and we are addressing this in multiple ways. There are newer products, newer technologies which are out there, and we'll be addressing that. Also as a part of the increase, we are also renegotiating our prices with customers as well as for the new opportunities which are out there to make sure that we protect our margins.
Okay. Because, I mean, the purpose to ask this question was to understand how much should we expect the margin compression at a contribution margin level. Because it's not only the memory, even the chip prices have sort of inched up because the demand for chips has also been higher. Can you give some qualitative or quantitative number that, how much could be the impact on the margins?
Yeah. As I said, if you ask a specific memory where the increase has been the largest, right? I mean, other increases selectively have not been as dramatic as memory. Thankfully, memory is only a very small portion of our value. As you know, it's like high-volume components. Even large memories, the cost of those that are not very high compared to the several thousand dollars of BOM costs, the cost that we have of our product, right, of course, of many thousands of dollars. It's a very small component. Nevertheless, I think we are kind of making sure it is accounted in our cost and basically renegotiating and reoffering new prices with the escalation to make sure that we protect our margin. The same holds for other cost escalations which are there, which are far more controlled and also very controlled by Roy.
Because we also have long-term pricing contracts with our suppliers also, right? Those transitions happen very slowly, and we have the window of negotiating prices on any new deals that we sign to account for the cost escalation.
Sir, last question from my side. Since you're not giving any revenue guidance as such, I mean, last year you did give revenue guidance, how should we look at the revenue growth for FY 2027 and margin? I mean, any quantitative or qualitative color will be helpful.
Yeah. Pranav, we've never given revenue or any other financial number guidance in the past, and so I think we will stick to that. I mean, we are not in a position to give any new guidance. However, as I said, we have a stronger business outlook, and as I talked about that with all the investments that are made and with our positive business outlook, we have continued the investments during the year, even though business didn't materialize. Because we figured out that investments in product evolution and building the new technologies was very important for our future business growth. We continued on that. Obviously, our outlook is very positive for the future, and we expect to see growth. As a practice, we've never quantified in terms of numbers.
Thank you so much for all the answers. Wish you all the very best.
Thank you, Pranav.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Ritesh Poladia from Girik Capital. Please go ahead.
Thanks for the opportunity. The question is on the balance sheet. There's a good increase in intangibles under development from INR 400 crore-INR 950 crores. What does that represent, sir?
Yeah. I think Intangible Under Development commonly consists of our product development effort and also related to the IP or the technology license or the technology transfer that we did with NEC early part of or towards the end of the previous year. That is partly getting reflected in the Intangible Under Development.
That investment was about INR 550 odd crores. Everything has been done or still it is to be done?
A large part of it is done. I think it is linked to milestones, and I think balance milestones we expect to get done within the next one or two quarters. With the commercialization of all the investments that we made, which are as part of the intangible assets, all of them will get capitalized as when we have commercial feasibility and commercial adoption of all the new technology and products that we've developed, including this licensing.
Sure. From that IP only you got this first order from NEC customer?
Well, that was part of the agreement with NEC, that we license some technology and we build radios for the future. Okay.
Is this part of the same agreement where you got the first order? Because your order book is INR 1,500 crores and 80% is India, that would be very small amount, right?
Yeah. As I said, we've signed the contract for the supplies, and so the revenue for that business will actually happen in FY 2027. It is part of the same partnership, even though the two contracts are separate. The technology licensing contract and this supply contract are different completely.
Okay. When do we see the revenue from this technology agreement?
No . From this new contract with NEC, we'll see the revenue for that in FY 2027.
Okay.
The other current financial year.
Sure. Sir, as this becomes bit complex, could you at least give us some sense that what kind of or what amount of opportunities you are chasing right now? By what time some of this will get booked, say five, or what are the milestones which we can look for it?
Again, on this, definitely we have been chasing quite large opportunities, both mainly, again, from wireless perspective, quite a few of those are international opportunities, which we have built over last one year. If you would have seen that we have started quite a few trials also. Again, difficult to give the overall size of the funnel number, but it is substantial. Those will be getting, again, ordered in the coming year, and then yeah, revenue booking also should happen from that in the coming year.
Sure. I understand you are constrained in commenting further, but just to take it bit forward, will this opportunity will be multiples of what you got in BSNL?
Multiples of what we got in BSNL.
Yeah.
The original one, no, it would not be that 100,000 size kind of thing. Because you know that numbers outside India are a little bit smaller as compared to BSNL. I think from our product perspective, reference building perspective, and coming to the international wireless area, I think that would be very significant.
Sure. Regarding R&D spend for FY 2027, is there any cut down, or are you still going strong on your R&D investments, whatever you are looking for?
We'll continue our R&D investments, but obviously we will tailor it to the business outlook that we have and how to see the business maturing. As I said, we will be optimizing it to make sure that we get much better financial results. As of now, we plan to continue with our investments because the business outlook that we see in FY 2027, we should be able to achieve better financial results even with our current investments and cost structure. We will keep optimizing that as we see the business progress during the year.
Sure. One final question on receivables. Where do we see this number going in FY 2027?
I think on receivables, there are two points to make. One is the number that you see needs to be looked at in context of the corresponding advance that we've received as part of the BSNL 4G order, which is currently showing up in current liabilities. Having said that, we expect the remaining collections from BSNL to significantly happen during this current financial year. We expect the receivables to progressively come down over the next couple of quarters. Obviously, this will also increasingly be a function of also the incremental business scale-up that happens over the next few quarters.
Yeah. That I understand. The entire BSNL 4G will be collected in this year?
A significant portion of that should get collected this year.
Okay.
That again, also linked to milestones. Those progressively are getting complete. We expect that to lead to collections over the next few quarters.
Yes. That's it from my side, Arnob. Thank you very much, sir.
Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Avnish Kumar from Ritu Financial Services. Please go ahead.
Hello. Good evening. Am I audible?
Yes.
First of all, I had a complaint, the timing for the con call was 7:15 P.M., and we started around 8:15 P.M., and, I mean, the presentation was out at 8:13 P.M. or 8:12 P.M., so we didn't get any time to read or analyze the presentation before the con call. This has been repeated for the past seven, eight quarters. I requested four, five quarters earlier also that time should be given to the investors to analyze and read the report at least, but still the same story.
Yeah, I think this time especially, we had a lot of problems in uploading and that took a lot more time, so we had to progressively. Again, once again, I apologize for that delay and the short window between the upload and the start of this call. We'll make sure that it doesn't happen in the future.
Thank you. Secondly, sir, congratulations on the patents that you've got in this quarter and the developments that you've got on the product side. Well, the presentation that you gave was too technical for a layman like me, so it sounded like Greek and Latin for me. Whatever you said, congratulations for that. As an investor, if we see the financials, I'm pretty disappointed with the way Tejas is going, and I believe the shareholders' money is being taken for granted. I do not see any progress in the financials. Even now, you're not able to give any kind of clarity on the future that we hold. Pretty bad situation that we are in right now. Very disappointed.
I agree, Avnish. I think, of course, as part of the company's management, it's been disappointing for us also as well. There were a lot of business that, as I mentioned, that we had planned for, based on which we had made investments that got delayed. We think that after this BSNL project, this has been a year of transition for us. Going forward, with everything that we have done and invested in, that we should be looking at a much more better and predictable financial results going forward. Yes.
Sir, I just wanted to say, like, see, our share price has come down from the lifetime high of INR 1,495 to it's staying now in the range of INR 300 also. I understand that market forces are there that drive the share prices apart from the financials, but you should take care about the shareholders' money also, and some guidance should be given about the future. This is just my recommendation. Rest, I leave up to your wisdom.
Sure. We'll take this into account.
Thank you, boss. Thank you so much.
Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Pratap Maliwal from Mount Intra Finance Private Limited. Please go ahead.
Hello. Hi. Am I audible?
Yes, you're audible, Pratap.
Yeah. Hi, sir. Thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to have a clarification regarding that earlier participant's question regarding the NEC deal for the supply of the Massive MIMO radio. Is that part of our current order book of INR 1,500 crores or is that yet to come in, as you said that it'll be revenued out in FY 2027? Is that already part of our book?
Okay. For this deal, that basically means that we are entering this account with NEC. There is a first PO which has been received, which is part of the INR 1,500 crores. As we go along, the purchase orders would come as the rollout progresses through the year.
Okay, can you give us any idea of how we can understand that this will scale up? Because as you're saying that the outlook for FY 2027 is that we get some better results, because FY 2026 has been a year of transition, can you give us some idea on how this is expected to scale up?
You mean this particular deal or the overall business in general?
Both, sir, but in particular the NEC deal, because as you're saying that we get some follow-on purchase orders as well. What can we expect the scalability to be?
As I mentioned, we.
Yeah. It all basically depends upon the rollout, which the customer does. As the rollout happens, then yeah, the new purchase orders keep coming. Difficult to, again, give a number projection on it. I would say, I think the follow-on orders would be again better than whatever we have as of now.
Now just one thing. When I look at our FY 2026, we've had a PAT loss of approximately INR 900 crores. Now, FY 2027, as you're saying that it'll be a year of transition and we get better results, what is our path back to profitability? Can you give us some understanding on that front?
Yeah, I think we expect much better business in FY 2027, based on the opportunities that we see. With that, we will also manage our costs at the current level and optimize as required to make sure that we have a path to profitability. Because as I said, this has been one year where business got delayed, but we didn't want to compromise on our investments for the future opportunities. Going forward, I think we will ensure that one part of it is the business, which is out there, and our cost structure, which is there. They are in line. We do expect that, from the business outlook that we see in FY 2027, we should end up with much better financial results. As the business progresses, we will monitor and optimize our costs accordingly.
Are we expecting to be PAT positive in FY 2027?
Yeah. We don't give financial guidance, but yes, that's the goal.
Okay, sir. Thanks for taking my question.
Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Darshil Jhaveri from Crown Capital. Please go ahead.
Hello. Good evening, sir. Thank you so much for taking my question. Sir, as I understand, you're not going to give any guidance, but with regards to just our inventories and receivables, that's putting a severe strain on our balance sheet. What is the company's aim regarding that? I understand even if I net off the other current liabilities for receivables, that still is nearly double the revenue than what we've done in FY 2026. Just wanted to understand, what do we expect out of this, and has company modeled out if BSNL order is even delayed by another year, because that's not in our hands, right? What is the inventory level? Will there be deterioration? Will there be some other write-off that we need to take? What do you feel is the realistic outlook that we can have with regards to our inventories and receivables, sir?
I think on receivables, I broadly clarified in response to the earlier question. We are expecting to get the balance collections from BSNL significantly during this year, and that should lead to improvement from a receivable standpoint. On inventory also, I think, as you alluded to, a large part of this is also coming from the advanced procurement action that we took for the BSNL add-on order. Right now we continue to be in discussions with them with respect to getting the order, and the inventory here is something that gets used in the radios that we sell, and those can potentially also be sold to other customers. That's where it is. I think for now, I don't think we have any further clarity with respect to the BSNL add-on order.
See, the inventory for these products, the BSNL 4G products are not unique to BSNL. I mean, they are a wide range of radios for 4G and 4G available to 5G, which are applicable for any kind of customers. Many of the opportunities that we are positioning ourselves internationally, in the private 4G networks and all those kind of things, all use the same products. The inventory will also be used for many of those opportunities when they convert. It's not very unique to BSNL. However, as you have noted that most of it had been procured for BSNL, so a significant part of it will go along with BSNL add-on order. Independently they will be consumed along with other business opportunities that we have globally.
Okay. Fair enough, sir. Just another question regarding our cash generation ability, sir. Even in the current year, I think we've been able to only generate around INR 135 crores of cash. That takes into account all the change in inventory advances that we've gotten. On the basis of that, I think we have invested, I think around INR 700 crores in intangible assets, right, sir? Majorly, if I'm not wrong, our investment in intangible is debt-funded. What is the rationale behind that? Because I don't know if this is sustainable at a certain level, right, sir? If we are not going to be cash positive in FY 2027, we might be funding our intangibles with debt, but it will take tax time to get traction. We'll get orders, we'll get minute orders.
In that time, I don't want our company's balance sheet to deteriorate so much that we have bigger issues than research and development, sir. Any comment on that, sir?
No, I agree with your observation. The point is that since we are in the deep tech space, being in a situation where you don't invest in technology evolution is a higher, bigger risk for the future of your business than the other way around, right? From that point of view, in FY 2026, we took the call that even with the business shortfall that we see, with the transition that is happening and with the technology that we needed to develop to leverage the future, that we'll continue with our investment. We have done that. As you see, we have launched many products which will help us for the business of the future.
I think going forward in FY 2027, as I said, the financial diligence of investments versus returns and revenues and all will be far tighter because I believe the significant investment has gone in and we have achieved much of the goals that we had in mind. In FY 2027 and beyond, it will be a much more well-balanced investment that will happen in line with the business outlook, which will then also continue to evolve and be monitored very closely.
Fair enough, sir. Just one last question from my end, sir. Right now we are at around INR 1,500 crores of order book. If you may, sir, any kind of target of the order wins that we want? I'm not saying specifically for this year. Maybe with the new technologies over a period of three years, what is the target that we can have in terms of order wins? Because even if some kind of direction we can get in this, that would be really helpful, sir.
Well, as I said, the investments have been made with an eye on significant growth. This significant growth will be, of course, over year-over-year numbers. If you leave out the one-off BSNL project, those kinds of projects will come, and there will be spikes in our business, and they happen. If you look at the business trend without those one-off projects kind of thing, whatever you see, we will definitely hopefully see business growth on top of what we have seen earlier in FY 2024 and so on. That's all I can say. I think the overall growth in our opportunities, there will be a significant growth in our opportunities. There will be lot more investments happening from operators, from enterprises, from ISPs and so on. We are well-positioned over there.
Obviously, this investment has been made with a business which is several multiples of what we have done in FY 2026, right? That's basically the outlook based on which we have made all the investments.
Okay, fair enough, sir. That's it from my side, sir. All the best.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Shailesh Shah from Invest Yard. Please go ahead.
Hi, sir. I was in queue again. I had a question about data center connectivity business. TCS is actively building data centers, actively participating in data center building. They have a plan of going forward. Do we have certain benefits of being a Tata Group company, and we can get an PO from TCS in some way? Do we have a benefit, sir? Not in terms of amount, but in terms of being a group company? That's what my question was.
Well, I mean, independent of being a group company, we are engaged with not only TCS, but other of this data center builders for our products. We have seen what a lot of our success in optical has been as part of those data center builders. TCS is, yes, one of our important customers as well for data center applications. Yes, we are closely engaged with them with their future business plans. I'd like to highlight that they are not the only one for our data center business-related growth.
Okay. Thank you. That was my question.
Yeah.
Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Arpit Jain from Wallfort Financial Services Limited. Please go ahead.
Hello. Can you hear me?
Yes, we can hear you, Arpit Jain.
Yeah. Hi. Over the last year, we filed a couple of patents. I just wanted an idea regarding when do these patents generate revenue for us? What is the rationale behind filing so many patents? What's the future outlook regarding this patent?
Yeah. See, as a deep-tech company, we need to file patents. One is to protect our inventions, so that our innovations are not replicated easily. The second part of this is that, especially in the wireless space, there is a lot of the patents that go into what are called the Standard Essential Patents. These are patents which are used for building as per the new standards of 5G or 5G-Advanced or 6G, based on 3GPP standard evolution. As a wireless company, and also from our other business, we need this patent portfolio to be both from a point of protecting our innovation as well as a defensive portfolio where you would be cross-licensing patents from other companies, which are absolutely essential in nature as far as developing your wireless products and technology are concerned.
In summary, both in terms of protecting our innovations and also for giving us a solid base for being able to cross-license patents and technologies with other technology developers.
Okay.
This is more than a direct monetization of the number of patents that we have. It is monetization in a little indirect way.
Oh, okay. Thank you.
Yes. We have time for one last question, yeah.
Sure. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Rajakumar Vaidyanathan from RK Invest. Please go ahead.
Yeah, good evening. Can you hear me?
Yes, I can hear you.
Yeah. Thanks for the opportunity. Sir, just couple of questions. The first question is it reasonable to expect a break-even in FY 2027 and a PAT-positive in FY 2028?
That's the goal. I mean, not give guidance, but that's reasonable. As I said, FY 2026 has been a year of investment. FY 2027, we expect to see far better financial results with the business output that he has, and with the investments and the expense control that we will have within the company. The expectation is that, yes, financial turnaround as quickly as possible, starting with FY 2027.
Okay. The second question is on this elongated DSO that you have with the BSNL order. Do you expect that elongated DSO even for the order that is under execution because you still not collected over INR 3,000 crores, so will the same issue will happen with the current order as well?
No, you're talking about the collections from the upcoming order, add-on order. Is that what you're talking about?
Yeah. There are two issues. The one, whatever AR that is outstanding that you have shown in as of March 2026, that you said that you will be able to collect significantly in FY 2027. My question is, the order that you are executing, which is about INR 1,500 crores, the orders on hand that you mentioned, right? There also the DSO will be elongated DSO or there you expect the collections to happen much faster?
Yeah. Two things. Number one, out of this INR 1,500 crores of order book, BSNL purchase order is still not part of that, because as we said that we are still in discussion to get that into the purchase order. Second, the collection for this should be faster than the original order because first time we kind of delivered the product, tested it, then there is acceptance testing, and then there is rigorous testing against integration with their existing elements and all that. Those things will not be there when we go for this add-on PO. Because these add-on POs would be same technology, similar products to be integrated or to be installed. The delivery time and installation time and acceptance time would be much faster.
Okay. Got it, Sir. Sir, the last question is, can you give me what is your total headcount as of March 2026 vis-à-vis March 2025?
Total, our headcount is roughly about 2,300 employees, and that has broadly remained the same compared to the previous year.
Okay. Thank you so much, Sir.
Thank you.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, with this, I now hand the conference over to the management for closing comments.
Thank you, Mohit. Thanks everyone for attending the call and for all your questions. First of all, once again, my apologies for starting this an hour later than the scheduled time. Secondly, as you've seen the results of FY 2026, the key takeaway I want you gentlemen to have is that, yes, the results have been quite disappointing, but at the same time, we are positive about our future based on which we have made substantial investments during the year to make sure our products are ready and technologically ready and capable for the business and the technology transition that we see. We look forward to a much better future. With that mindset, the investments have been made, and I hope to work with you all and connect with you all in future again and deliver a much better FY 2027. Thank you.
Thank you.
Yeah.
On behalf of ICICI Securities Limited, that concludes this conference. Thank you all for joining us and you may now disconnect your lines.