Indian Railway Catering & Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), one of the companies running within the Indian Railways ecosystem has announced its results for the third quarter of the financial year 2019-20 and the figures look quite promising. What’s more the company has declared a dividend of ₹10 on each share with a face value of ₹10.
In the third quarter, the company has posted a revenue of ₹715.98 crore a jump of almost 65% over the same quarter last year. More importantly, the profit figure stood at an impressive ₹205.8 crore, a whopping nearly 180% increase over the profit of ₹73.59 crore made in the third quarter of FY19.
The IRCTC scrip could become the darling of the stock markets with its price hovering around the ₹1,500 mark. This is definitely a success story for the Railways and the government, since the company went in for an IPO last year which got oversubscribed several times and the stock was listed at a huge premium.
IRCTC handles a variety of operations for the Indian Railways starting with onboard catering. The IRCTC online ticket booking platform has constantly reinvented itself and offers a host of services to passengers within the ticket booking functions.
The company has now started operating the Tejas Express, a move to privatise the railways partially. IRCTC gets to fix the fare for the trains and sell the tickets and handle the catering and all other services onboard. Based on the pilot operation by IRCTC, Indian Railways is now planning to offer more trains to private operators for which the tenders are being floated. IRCTC can also participate in these tenders and bag a few more routes.