L&T set to bid for Oman, Abu Dhabi airports

Engineering and construction major Larsen & Toubro Ltd is planning to bid for the construction of airports in Oman, Abu Dhabi and at a couple more places, according to reports.

The bidding process for some of the projects is expected to be completed this year. The news is hardly surprising, however, as the company has been involved in building infrastructure projects in West Asia for the past few years.

It is not new to working on airports either - at Delhi airport, it is involved in design and construction work of the terminal, runway and associated works.

With an order book that's nudging Rs1,00,000 crore, L&T has managed to bag an order almost every week in the last couple of months and sometimes even two. It has seen a huge chunk of its orders, close to Rs55,000 crore worth, coming in the three months up to March 2010.

More than a third of the business last year has come through in the March 2010 quarter, and as a result, the order book has grown by 35 per cent in 2009-10.

R Shankar Raman, executive vice-president, L&T, says project orders do tend to be higher in the quarter up to March, and the pattern doesn't seem to have changed too much over the years. He points out that the industry is coming off a slowdown that may have also contributed to the deluge of orders. ''I am optimistic that execution will be better from here and the delays in the past will not be there either this year or next year,'' he adds.