With coronavirus count topping 1.8 lakh and number of deaths soaring, Italy has announced an unprecedented lockdown in a bid to contain the spread of the contagion.

Umesh Chowdhary, VC and MD, Titagarh Wagons discussed the impact of the same on company's business and operations.

“As far as Italy is concerned, our orderbook in the Italian subsidy stands at about 300 million euros. The current year’s revenue was not very large because most of these orders were to be executed in FY20-FY21 or at least substantial part of them. The situation in Italy remains very fragile as of now," he said.

"We have been watching the situation for the last month or so and we had announced several measures like work from home and so on and so forth but after the recent increase in cases – in the last 48 hours there have been 700 deaths in Italy alone – we decided there is no point in risking the safety of the people. So we suspended operations for a period of two weeks. We are hoping that the situation should get under control,” he said.

“Italian government have been extremely proactive. The government has announced financial stimulus of 25 billion euros. We do not know in what form, in what fashion they will help out but the government at every level has continuously said that the Italian enterprises will be supported, the entire brunt of this unfortunate event will not be taken by the enterprises, he said, adding that as of now, there is a situation which is completely of panic, completely of lack of clarity in Italy. So it is very difficult to understand what and how much the Italian government or any other agency is going to support, he added.

“Nobody has a clue of what would be the magnitude of this current problem. We do not know when this problem will peak out. In terms of revenues, we had all the production for the Sicilian metro and also for the Pune metro prototype, they were scheduled to be starting within March and April, we had already started the production for the Naples metro, which we are executing, which was started in January," he said,

Therefore, it is not a very happy period to have this problem because this was the period where we were ramping up our production, we had gone public in saying that FY20-21 we are very confident of turning positive. We had turned positive in EBITDA this year, first nine months we have had positive EBITDA, let us see how things pan out. It is too early for me to say what kind of revenue losses or time losses are going to be there,” said Chowdhary.

“We will try to prepone the holiday of August. August is the holiday month in Europe, we have an in-principle agreement with the unions that they will consider this period or rather substitute the holiday period with this current period. So we will try to make up for the year, whatever is the loss in revenue to the best possible extent,” he further mentioned.

In terms of Indian business, he stated, “We have not seen any impact as of now but in India we are seeing the new embargo in terms of travel etc. Therefore, the economy is likely to take a hit on account of the current problem. The problem is that the metro project that we are delivering for Pune - the prototype trains and the designing is happening in Italy - so there could be some delays but that again we will try to make up using August and whatever is the best possible ways – weekends etc. Otherwise we have not seen a major impact in the Indian business as of now.”