Hindustan Construction Company posted its second consecutive loss in the December quarter and expects weakness till next year due to high interest costs and project delays.

HCC posted a loss of 130.4 crore while turnover slipped 7.6% to 949.2 crore.

The company has made a one time provision of 166 crore, primarily for cost overrun and likely losses on two projects under construction.

Mr Ajit Gulabchand CMD said that "The financial performance reflects the difficult economic and business environment. The revenue growth was lower due to slow order booking during the last four quarters, execution bottlenecks, rising interest cost and payment delays by clients.”

Mr Praveen Sood CFO of HCC told ET that "We are trying hard to move from loss to cash profit and from that to net profit but it wouldn't happen for another year. We should be able to report operating profits by the first quarter of 2013-14.”

Mr Sood further said that "We had won two projects on certain estimates that we had made earlier, now we feel we would not be able to recover the cost on these two projects. It is quite possible that our bid was aggressive.” He added that "We have taken pains to clear our balance sheet in this quarter.”

(Sourced from ET)