GE Vernova T&D India's order book has stood still since March as sales climb

GE Vernova T&D India ended September with orders in hand of ₹21,440 crore, a shade below the ₹21,460 crore it held at the end of March. In the same stretch its factories were busier than a year ago: sales in the September 2026 quarter rose 31.8% from a year earlier. A flat order book beside fast-rising sales means new work has arrived only about as quickly as finished work went out, and that matters more for this company than the profit line does.

The business makes the heavy equipment that carries electricity across the grid: power transformers, reactors and gas-insulated switchgear, and the converter equipment for high-voltage direct-current (HVDC) lines. Its customers are mostly central transmission utilities and private developers that win transmission projects at auction, and export buyers, many of them other GE Vernova companies. An order counts as orders in hand once it is booked (for large HVDC contracts, only when agreed commercial milestones are reached) and becomes sales as the equipment is built and shipped, so the size of the book sets how much revenue is already lined up.

Last quarter on its own looked healthy. Orders of ₹2,440 crore were about a fifth more than the quarter's sales, and the chief executive said they included no one-off. The quarter before was weak, at ₹1,140 crore. Taken together, first-half orders of ₹3,580 crore came to 92.7% of first-half sales, calculated from the reported quarterly figures.

The chart shows where the present book came from. A single quarter, the last of the previous financial year, brought in ₹8,610 crore, and since then the company has described its backlog as including long-cycle HVDC projects. Those orders pay out slowly. The finance chief said no HVDC order would contribute significantly to execution in the current financial year, with the significant part coming from fiscal 2028 onwards and little expected even next year. So a large part of the book does little for sales in the near term; what feeds them is the shorter-cycle flow of transformer and switchgear orders, which over the past six months has run about level with sales.

What would lift the book again is a handful of large orders, and they have proved hard to schedule: in August management expected a US group export order in the second or third quarter of this financial year, and the largest group export project had already been put on hold by its customer. The nearest large order is Barmer, an HVDC transmission project now owned by the state-run Power Grid; the chief executive expects to book GE Vernova T&D India's equipment order this quarter. Like the earlier HVDC work, it would add to orders in hand well before it adds to sales.

The largest export opportunity has gone the other way. Shareholders had approved roughly ₹3,100 crore of switchgear component exports to two group companies in the Middle East and France, and that approval lapsed at this year's annual meeting because it was valid for one year. The customer has put the project on hold, so the order was never booked, and the chief executive said it was too early to judge whether the hold would lift in six months or a year. A separate approval covers about $151 million of exports to a US group company; management hopes to close that order in the second half of this financial year.

None of this has reached the reported results. The EBITDA margin, operating profit before depreciation and amortisation as a share of sales, was 27.1% last quarter, and the finance chief kept full-year guidance of a margin in the mid-20s. Cash, including money lent to the group's cash pool, was about ₹3,250 crore, and management said it was still weighing how to use the surplus for shareholders.

Management is more confident about orders than the first half alone suggests: the chief executive said this year's intake would be much stronger than last year's. A booked Barmer order would help, but mostly for orders in hand rather than for the next few quarters of sales. For those, the measure to follow is the ordinary flow of equipment orders, which in the past six months matched what the company shipped rather than outrunning it.