Shares of Macrotech Developers Ltd (Lodha) are in focus on Friday morning after the real estate developer said its pre-sales jumped 40 per cent at Rs 4,230 crore in the March quarter, which was its best quarterly performance ever.
In a filing to BSE, Lodha said its FY24 pre-sales stood at Rs14,520 crore -- its best ever annual presales, which helped it met its guidance of delivering 20 per cent growth.
Macrotech Developers said collections for the quarter stood at Rs 3,510 crore, up 20 per cent YoY. For FY24, collections stood at Rs 11,260 crore.
Lodha said it added new projects having cumulative GDV of Rs 20,300 crore across various micro-markets of MMR, Pune and Bengaluru in Q4, exceeding its own guidance of Rs 17,500 crore.
Macrotech Developers said its net debt got further reduced to Rs 3,010 crore, which is less than 0.2 times of equity, as it achieved its goal of net debt:equity ratio of less than o equal to 0.5 times. Continuing robustness in business fundamentals and strengthening of balance sheet has led to further credit rating upgrade to ‘AA- (Stable)’ by ICRA, it noted.
Macrotech Developers shares are up 8.3 per cent in 2024 so far. The stock has delivered a solid 153 per cent return in the past one year.
ICRA this week said its ratings upgrade on Lodha factors in the healthy increase in Macrotech Developers’ collections and cash flow from operations, which, along with the part deployment of the recent equity raise via qualified institutional placement (QIP) towards debt reduction to result in an improvement of the leverage metrics.
Macrotech Developers’ operating performance has remained strong in FY2024, which is expected to be sustained in FY2025, aided by healthy end-user demand, good sales velocity in its ongoing projects and a strong launch pipeline resulting in expected healthy collections and cash flows from operations (CFO), it said.
In the first nine-months of FY2024, the company’s pre-sales jumped 14 per cent YoY to Rs 10,290 crore, while the net collections were stable at Rs 6,920 crore (excluding repatriations from the UK).