what investors need to know before the IPO

Absolute Projects (India) Limited, known as APIL, is a Delhi headquartered power sector EPC company, filed its draft IPO papers with SEBI in March 2026 and currently sitting in the mainboard IPO pipeline. Company has been around for three decades, but financials only started looking IPO-ready in last two years – and that gap itself is worth sitting with before looking at anything else.

What does Absolute Projects (India) Limited do?

APIL is engineering, procurement and construction company built around India's power transmission and distribution sector. Incorporated in 1995, spent most of years since executing turnkey projects – surveying, designing, procuring equipment, installing, testing and commissioning transmission lines, substations, and both overhead and underground distribution networks.

What sets it apart from a pure execution contractor is that it manufactures chunk of what it installs. Through in-house facilities (and group entity, Ultima Switchgears, operating under ULTIMA brand), APIL produces electrical and structural components used in its own projects and also sells to outside customers. Company frames this as backward integration – gives them more control over quality and project timelines compared to a contractor buying everything from third-party vendors.

By numbers as of December 2025: APIL has cumulatively executed roughly 2,480 circuit kilometres of transmission and distribution lines, installed power transformers totalling 885 MVA and distribution transformers over 750,000 kVA, laid over 43 km underground cable, built more than 8,300 km of low-tension distribution lines, and constructed 55 substations ranging 33 kV to 220 kV.

What are the operational segments of Absolute Projects?

Business runs across four segments:

Power EPC Projects – core segment, transmission lines, substations, and distribution network construction on turnkey basis

Manufacturing – in-house production of electrical and structural components, sold both internally and to third parties

Civil construction – construction work tied to project execution

Operation and maintenance (O&M) services – post-commissioning support for completed infrastructure

Here's where it gets interesting. Manufacturing's share of revenue hasn't moved in one direction – went from 22.55% in FY23, down to 12.02% in FY24, then back up to 18.99% in FY25 and 27.69% in six months to September 2025. A steady climb would've read as clean pivot towards stickier, less working-capital-intensive revenue mix – genuinely good news, since manufacturing doesn't carry same discom payment-cycle exposure that pure EPC does. But a dip followed by a rebound looks less like strategy and more like whichever segment's contracts happened to be executing that year. That's meaningfully different story for how durable this mix will be going forward.

How does it make revenue?

Power EPC Projects is where most of money comes from – 85.64% of revenue in FY24, 75.85% in FY23, 75.39% in FY25, and 69.40% in six months to September 2025. Remainder comes mostly from manufacturing, with civil construction and O&M rounding things out.

Order book tells you where near-term revenue is coming from: as of December 2025 stood at roughly ₹747.5 crore, and heavily EPC-weighted – about 85% of total book sits in Power EPC Projects, and top five projects alone account for close to 68% of entire order book (nearly 80% of EPC book specifically). Useful context for anyone assuming revenue base is broad – it isn't. Handful of large contracts doing most of the work.

Who are the competitors of Absolute Projects?

APIL competes in a segment of market – power transmission and distribution EPC – that includes several already-listed names: KEC International, Kalpataru Projects International, Skipper, Transrail Lighting, Jyoti Structures, and Bajel Projects, among others. These companies vary in scale and strategy – some (like Transrail) lean heavily into T&D specifically, while larger peers like KEC and Kalpataru run more diversified order books across multiple infrastructure verticals.

This matters for sizing up APIL honestly. Its listed peers have track record spanning full commodity cycles, multiple discom payment cycles, and – in some cases – decades of demonstrated ability to win business from wide range of clients. APIL's own numbers, by contrast, only start looking like this over last two fiscal years, and its client base far narrower than any of names above. Not wrong to compare APIL to this peer set on sector fundamentals; it's a mistake to assume it has proven itself same way these companies have.

How has Absolute Projects performed in previous years?

This is where the story either gets exciting or gets you asking harder questions, depending on how you read it.

• Revenue: from ₹141.68 crore in FY23, going to ₹251.07 crore in FY24, then ₹312.12 crore by FY25 – roughly 2.2x growth over two year
• PAT: ₹2.90 crore in FY23, jumped to ₹14.65 crore FY24, touching ₹21.00 crore in FY25 – about 7x growth in same period
• EBITDA: ₹6.09 crore (FY23), ₹20.72 crore (FY24), ₹28.98 crore (FY25)

Read at face value, this look like a business hitting inflection point. Read more skeptically, worth noticing this acceleration happened in exact 24 months before the DRHP filing – and that timing itself is well-worn pattern among Indian small-cap IPO candidates. Doesn't mean the numbers fabricated. Does mean FY25 very plausibly the best-case print rather than steady-state one, and margins this strong hasn't yet been tested against harder commodity or payment-cycle environment. If underwriting this business, better underwrite off a normalized margin assumption, not the IPO-year number.

Who are the customers of Absolute Project?

Client list reads well: NTPC, Power Grid (PGCIL), Tata Power, L&T, Siemens, ABB, BSES, REL, IOC, and Honeywell all appears among APIL's customers. These serious, creditworthy counterparties, and having them on the books is a genuine positive – says something about the company's execution credibility on inspection-heavy, technically demanding contracts.

But there's a concentration problem sitting right next to that quality. APIL's top 10 customers accounted for 87.90% of revenue in FY23, 92.88% in FY24, 90.20% in FY25, and 94.98% in six months to September 2025 – essentially unchanged and consistently extreme across four year. Means almost all future growth beyond these existing relationship will have to be won in more competitive, open-tender territory where margins typically thinner. Client list a strength today and an unanswered question about tomorrow.

Is APIL worth putting money into?
India's power T&D capex story is real, this is not some thematic gamble. What's less clear is does APIL specifically have the institutional depth to keep compounding at the pace FY25 suggests.

There's reasons for caution mixed with the optimism.

Manufacturing Mix: The shift here looks shaky – 22.55% to 12.02% to 18.99% to 27.69%. This looks more like opportunistic swings than a planned strategy, and that matters because manufacturing's margin and working-capital benefits only help if the company is deliberately and consistently shifting towards it, not just riding whichever contracts happened to execute that year.
Customer Concentration: Almost flat at 88-95% across four years. Company still hasn't shown it can win and deliver for clients beyond its existing top 10.
Balance Sheet: Only tested through two clean years, not through a full cycle of discom payment delays or rising input cost pressure.

Valuation Context: Looking at listed T&D EPC peers gives a sense of the risk. Transrail Lighting has been trading in what analysts call attractive to very-attractive range on P/E (mid-teens to mid-20s, depending on date). Skipper and Jyoti Structures on the other hand trade much higher – Skipper's P/E is sitting in high-20s range, and Jyoti Structures has already moved from fair zone to expensive zone, EV/EBITDA multiple also sitting well above the sector median now.

If APIL's price band lands closer to Transrail side, this reads like a fairly defensible growth-at-fair-price bet, riding on a genuine sector tailwind – backed by issue structure that's funding capacity build (new manufacturing facility, EPC equipment, debt paydown, working capital), not a promoter looking to cash out. But if pricing lands closer to Skipper or Jyoti Structures multiples, then investors basically end up paying large-cap level pricing for a company that has shown only two years of unstressed performance, not a full cycle of proof yet.

Bottom line: This looks more like a sector-conviction bet, dressed up as company-conviction bet. Tailwind part is real, no doubt. But the company's specific moat – asset backed via its own manufacturing facilities, yet thin on institutional proof given the small employee base, wobbly segment mix and concentrated client list – still isn't proven. Eventual price band and RHP-stage financials, especially receivables, debtor days and any updated H2 FY26 numbers, deserves close watching before sizing up a position. Better to treat this as a tactical, sector-tailwind allocation rather than decade-hold conviction name, at least till APIL manage to show it can grow client base meaningfully beyond current ten names.