Railtel Corporation Of India Limited (RAILTEL) share price
₹254.65 on NSE as of 2026-10-07. -1.16% on the day. market cap ₹8,173 Cr. P/E 40.5. 52-week range ₹246.10 to ₹397.65. Telecommunication.
RailTel Corporation Q1 FY27: Revenue Up 20%, Profit Flat, and a ₹11,747 Crore Order Book
At a glance
RailTel rents out telecom capacity and builds technology projects for government departments and the railways. Revenue for the three months to June 2026 reached ₹893 crore. The same quarter a year earlier brought ₹744 crore, a rise of about a fifth. Net profit was ₹65.78 crore, against ₹66.10 crore in the same quarter last year. Twenty per cent more revenue arrived and the profit line stayed almost exactly where it was.
Profit before exceptional items came to ₹96 crore, against ₹86 crore a year earlier. Management put that increase at 12 per cent and explained why reported profit did not follow. Management attributed the flat reported profit to Expected Credit Loss provisioning, which it called non-cash on the call. Expected Credit Loss provisioning is money set aside against customer bills that may never be paid. Management added that the profit line grows once that provisioning is excluded. Debtor days, the average wait between billing a customer and being paid, stand at 175.
Orders received in the quarter were ₹1,688 crore, against ₹721 crore a year earlier, per management. The order book stands at ₹11,747 crore, measured against trailing twelve-month revenue of ₹4,427 crore. That leaves the book at roughly 2.7 times one year of revenue. The company collected a steady drip of further order announcements through June and July. The Ministry of Railways awarded ₹334.5 crore of e-Office upgradation work. Mahanadi Coalfields added ₹107.61 crore and Haryana Rail a further ₹82.04 crore. Eight more orders landed between ₹15 crore and ₹53 crore apiece. South East Central Railway terminated a ₹26.73 crore optical fibre contract, citing higher material costs.
Operating profit for the quarter was ₹131.57 crore, an operating margin of 14.7 per cent. The segment split ran Telecom at ₹361 crore and Projects at ₹532 crore. Management puts margins in the projects business at four to five per cent. RailTel added Starlink, the satellite internet operator, to its customer list this quarter.
Introduction
RailTel was incorporated in 2000 as a Schedule 'A' public sector undertaking under the Ministry of Railways. It was built to create a nationwide network for broadband, telecom, multimedia and virtual private networks. A second mandate was to modernise the train control and safety systems of Indian Railways. At inception the Railways transferred its optical fibre assets, largely running beside the tracks, for commercial operation. RailTel received Navratna status, a government grade that gives a state firm more financial freedom, on 30 August 2024.
The founding asset is an exclusive right of way to lay fibre along railway tracks. The backbone now spans over 62,000 km of optical fibre across the country. Right of way runs along 67,956 km of track serving 7,325 stations. A city access network adds 21,000 km on top of that backbone. The network has over 11,000 points of presence, the places where customers plug in. Of those access points, 6,117 sit at railway stations. Bandwidth offerings run from 2 Mbps at the small end up to 800 Gbps.
The business splits into two halves, telecom services and project work services. Telecom services covers leased lines, internet access, passive infrastructure and dark fibre let to other operators. It also covers tower colocation, virtual private networks and the RailWire retail broadband brand. Projects covers optical fibre work, railway signalling, video surveillance systems and smart city contracts. It also covers biometric infrastructure for public examinations and work outside India. ICRA, a credit-rating agency, puts projects at about 59 per cent of operating revenue in the year to March 2025.
Recent months have brought a run of state and central government orders. Uttar Pradesh ordered educational laboratories worth ₹18.54 crore and police recruitment security worth ₹41.32 crore. The Goa Labour Welfare Board ordered an online portal at ₹27.06 crore. Southern Power Distribution ordered a software-managed wide area network, an SD-WAN project, for ₹29.84 crore. HSEDC awarded operations and maintenance of its state wide area network at ₹16.2 crore. Munitions India ordered an MPLS bandwidth upgrade, on a managed data network, worth ₹15.78 crore. A letter of intent for disaster recovery infrastructure is worth ₹52.57 crore. NSIL placed an IT upgrade at ₹31.21 crore and IRCTC an infrastructure-as-a-service order at ₹33.79 crore. Odisha Police took a deployment of 170 experts worth ₹43.9 crore. North Central Railway ordered signalling work worth ₹32.74 crore during the same run.
The company runs Tier-III certified data centres, a reliability grade, at Gurgaon and Secunderabad. A 10 MW facility at Noida is being built with Techno Electric and Engineering. Its first phase of 5 MW is targeted for completion by May 2027. Edge data centres at Gurgaon and Mumbai are running, with Chandigarh, Indore and Vizag slated for October 2026. ICRA reaffirmed its ratings on the company at AA (Stable) and A1+ in February 2026.
Business model
RailTel owns a very long piece of string and rents it out.
That is the telecom half, built on the right of way along Indian Railways track. The corridor already crosses the country, already has land clearance and already employs people to clear vegetation. Management says RailTel has "independent and completely different right of way", while "most other players are along the road". Anyone who has watched a municipal contractor dig up a freshly laid road will follow the argument.
Leased lines brought ₹134 crore in the June quarter and internet services ₹112 crore. Passive infrastructure, the ducts and towers let to other operators, added ₹27 crore. The retail arm is RailWire, the thirteenth largest broadband provider in India. It ranks fourth in rural areas by subscriber count, at 6.23 lakh subscribers, per management. The base grew by roughly 50,000 subscribers over the year, again per management. About 59 per cent of subscribers live in rural areas, across more than 20,000 villages. Management describes the segment as "very heated", with average revenue per user "continuously under pressure". Indian broadband has long run on a pattern where the product improves yearly and the price does not.
The other half is Project Work Services, where RailTel bids for and executes government contracts. In practice those contracts cover a startling range of public activity. Orders in the year to March 2026 include modernising the offices of the Inspector General of Registration in Maharashtra, at ₹1,136 crore. School laboratories for physics, chemistry and biology in Bihar are worth ₹822 crore. A hospital management system for Greater Mumbai accounts for ₹352 crore. An intelligent traffic system in Vidarbha is worth ₹233 crore, student kits for Bihar ₹206 crore. A cloud-based newsroom for Doordarshan comes in at ₹135 crore. The fibre company now builds school laboratories, which is what the tender list asked for.
The railway-flavoured work sits under signalling, starting with Kavach, the automatic train protection system. Kavach is deployed across 502 km and 607 km in East Central Railway. West Central Railway accounts for another 1,067 km of the same system. Tunnel communication covers 152 tunnels and Wi-Fi runs at 6,117 stations. e-Office runs across 236 railway units serving over 1.62 lakh users. A hospital management system covers 716 railway hospitals and health units.
Management calls RailTel "a group of two companies in one company". Projects run at four to five per cent margins, per management. Telecom margins sit, again per management, "almost in the range where they were". The organisation runs to more than 800 professionals with an average age under 40. It works from a corporate office in Delhi, four regions and 21 territories. Clients include the Ministry of Railways, SAIL, ONGC and Google. The list also carries SECL, SBI, Bank of Baroda and Amazon. The Coast Guard, the Air Force and EPFO buy from the company as well. Starlink, the satellite internet operator, joined the customer list this quarter.
Quarterly results, balance sheet, cash flow, ratios, shareholding and the filings themselves are on the full page for Railtel Corporation Of India Limited.
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