Chaman Metallics FY26: Revenue Triples to ₹541 Cr, and the Profit Line Turns Red for the First Time in Six Years

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1 — At a Glance

Here is a number that stops you: sales of ₹541 crore in FY26, up from ₹172 crore a year earlier — a 214% jump. For a sponge-iron maker in Chandrapur that spent years hovering around ₹180 crore, that is not growth, that is a different company wearing the same name.

And then the second number, which you have to read twice: net profit of minus ₹4.17 crore. After five straight profitable years — ₹17 crore as recently as FY23 — the bottom line went red exactly in the year revenue tripled.

The bridge between those two facts is built from two other numbers. Interest cost went from ₹1.61 crore to ₹29.46 crore. Depreciation went from ₹2.33 crore to ₹14.32 crore. A large expansion project switched on during the year, and the moment it did, its financing and its wear-and-tear landed on the P&L in full — while the new capacity was still learning to run.

Borrowings sit at ₹440 crore against a net worth of ₹95 crore. The market cap is ₹246 crore. Interest coverage is 0.90 — operating profit didn’t quite cover the interest bill.

A company that just quadrupled its asset base to ₹644 crore, on the strength of a debt pile bigger than its own equity, in the first year the whole thing ran together. Whether the revenue holds its shape once the new plants settle is the entire story here.

2 — Introduction

Chaman Metallics was incorporated in 2003 and makes sponge iron from a plant at Tadali, in the Chandrapur district of Maharashtra. It is part of the GR Group, a cluster that manufactures ISI-grade MS ingots and TMT bars, and through its sponge-iron line the company feeds the metallic input needs of steel producers in nearby geographies.

For most of its listed life — it came to the NSE Emerge SME board in January 2023, raising ₹24.13 crore — it was a small, steady operation. Sponge iron in, sponge iron out, ₹180-odd crore of revenue, single-digit-crore profits.

Then came the big build. The group ran a capex through Chaman to add a new sponge-iron plant, a billet unit, a cast-iron unit, and captive power. Trial runs of the DRI unit, power plant and submerged-arc furnace were flagged in March 2025. Through FY26, the divisions came alive in sequence: sponge iron in April 2025, ferro in May, power in July, the SMS billet division in November. FY26 is therefore the first year the expanded company reports as a whole — and the first year it reports at full cost.

The expansion budget itself moved during the build, revised from ₹296 crore up to ₹396 crore in March 2025. That is the context under every number that follows.

3 — Business Model: WTF Do They Even Do?

Strip the group branding away and the core is elegantly boring: you take iron ore and coal, you heat them in a rotary kiln without melting, and out comes sponge iron — a porous, spongy metallic that steelmakers remelt. The by-product, dolochar, gets sold on. Iron ore fines, dust and scrap round out the rest. That was the whole show for years, and it was a show that worked.

FY26 changed the shape of the business into something with three legs. The FY26 segment disclosure splits revenue into Steel, Ferro and Power — the first time segments were reported at all, because the group notes the divisions only started commercial production during the year. Steel is the bulk of it. Ferro alloys and a captive power plant are the new companions, the latter meant to feed the furnaces their own electricity rather than buy it.

There’s a genuine logic to captive power in this industry — energy is a brutal share of the cost of cooking iron, and a plant that makes its own is a plant less exposed to the grid’s mood. The catch is that all three legs switched on almost simultaneously, so FY26 is less a steady-state picture than a first rehearsal with the full orchestra.

The sponge-iron installed capacity stood at 72,000 MTPA before this. A November 2025 consent-to-establish clears a path to 352,500 TPA. This is a company mid-transformation, and the model you are reading is the new one on day one.

Does a first-year-of-full-operations P&L tell you what the business is, or only what a launch costs?

4 — Financials Overview

Figures are consolidated, in ₹ crore. Chaman reports on a half-yearly basis; the table below shows the latest half (Oct 2025–Mar 2026) against the same half last year and the immediately preceding half.

Revenue in the latest half is more than four times the year-ago half — the