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Summary: Genus Power made Rs 605 crore in profit in FY26. It also burned through Rs 203 crore in cash from operations, for the third straight year. The order book is at Rs 25,173 crore. The profit number and the cash number are telling two different stories.
Genus Power made Rs 605 crore in profit in FY26. In the same year, it burned through Rs 203 crore in cash from operations.
That is not a one-off. In FY25, cash from operations was negative Rs 443 crore. And the year before that. Three straight years of growing profits, three straight years of cash going out faster than it comes in. The order book is at Rs 25,173 crore. Revenue nearly doubled. Management expects Rs 6,000 to 6,500 crore in the year ahead.
The excitement makes sense. But something has changed inside this business. And that change is what the profit number does not tell you.
The old model and the new one
Genus used to make electricity meters, sell them to utilities and get paid. Simple. Cash came in when the product went out.
India's smart-meter rollout changed that. Electricity utilities across the country need to replace old meters with smart ones that can help reduce power theft. But most utilities do not have the money to pay upfront. So companies like Genus now finance the entire project—buying the meters, installing them, connecting them to software, maintaining them for years. The utility pays back slowly, through milestones and monthly charges, once the meters are working and billing has started.
Genus spends today. It collects later. Sometimes much later.
That single shift, from selling a product to financing and running a long-term project, explains everything that follows.
The order book and who sits behind it
Most of Genus' Rs 25,173 crore order book sits inside a platform called Gemstar. Genus owns 26 per cent of Gemstar. A fund backed by Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC owns the rest.
Gemstar holds the contracts with electricity utilities. It then hires Genus to do the actual work—supplying meters, installing them and maintaining them. Genus books revenue for doing that work. So the full order book is relevant to Genus' revenue, not just a quarter of it.
GIC's backing gives Genus access to large projects it could not have funded alone. But it also means Genus is working deep inside a long payment chain—spending on materials and labour now, waiting for milestone approvals and service charges later.
Nearly half of annual revenue sitting uncollected
At the end of FY26, a significant portion of Genus' work had been done but not yet paid for.
Money owed by customers for completed and billed work stood at Rs 1,484 crore, nearly a third of annual revenue. Work completed but not yet formally billed added another Rs 867 crore. Inventory, materials bought but not yet used, was Rs 1,351 crore. Together, the first two alone came to nearly half of FY26 revenue, sitting on the balance sheet waiting to become cash.
The good news is that things are moving in the right direction. The average time to collect payment fell from 187 days to 89 days in a single year. Total time that cash stays tied up in the business fell from 343 days to 274. Management expects a further improvement of 50 to 75 days in the year ahead.
But the cost of the ramp-up is visible in the borrowing number. Net debt, what the company owes after subtracting its cash, nearly tripled from Rs 605 crore to Rs 1,573 crore in a single year. Management expects it to peak around Rs 2,000 crore before the cash cycle starts to ease.
Two things to keep an eye on
Beyond the financials, two issues are worth monitoring.
The company's auditors noted that loans involving related entities, companies where Genus' senior management have significant influence, were repaid late or had their terms extended. The amounts are not large enough to threaten the business. But it is an uncomfortable signal for a company that itself needs working capital to grow.
Separately, the Enforcement Directorate is investigating two smart-meter contracts in Bihar from 2022-23. The allegation is that Genus won contracts worth Rs 997 crore and Rs 2,850 crore from Bihar's electricity utilities through irregular means. These are allegations only; no adverse finding has been made. But because the contracts relate to a meaningful slice of the smart-meter business, this is worth watching.
Two ways this story can end
If projects move smoothly from installation to live meters to approved billing to cash collection, the current pressure eases. Profits were real last year. Customers exist. The smart-meter rollout is happening at scale. Once projects stabilise, the maintenance work on each contract generates steady income for years.
If receivables stay high and billing approvals keep coming slowly, Genus may keep reporting strong profits while borrowing more each year to fund growth. The P&L will look good. The balance sheet will keep stretching.
Genus is not struggling because customers do not want smart meters. It is dealing with a structural feature of the business it has chosen to be in: cash goes out upfront and comes back slowly. The order book is big. Whether the cash follows is the only question that matters right now.
Tracking whether the cash actually follows the profits—through every quarterly result, every receivables update, every milestone approval—is the kind of continuous monitoring most investors don't have time for. Value Research Stock Advisor does. Fewer stocks, studied properly, with a clear view on when to buy, hold and sell.
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