Lakshmi Engineering & Warehousing Ltd is a story of reinvention - a former textile loom maker that, when its core product was made obsolete by new technology, pivoted to become a landlord for corporate India and a niche parts supplier for the very industry it once served. Incorporated in 1973 as Lakshmi Automatic Loom Works, the company stopped building complete weaving machines and instead converted its industrial land into a recurring rental business while keeping its engineering workshop alive making spares and precision components. The recurring pattern is one of extracting steady, low-risk income from owned real estate while using its engineering DNA to serve a shrinking but global pool of legacy textile mills - two unrelated engines, run lean, with no debt-fuelled ambition.
Business segments
Two unrelated engines with no shared customer - a warehousing landlord collecting rent on a highway, and a precision workshop supplying parts to dying and emerging industries alike - each a separate answer to the same question of what to do when your original product disappears.
1. Industrial warehousing: a landlord on the Bangalore-Chennai highway
The company owns a shed on a prime industrial estate and rents it out to big companies on multi-year leases - a simple property-income business with no tenant churn.
- Location is the entire moat - the facility sits inside the SIPCOT Industrial Complex in Hosur, right on the Bangalore-Salem/Chennai Highway, giving tenants direct access to Karnataka and other southern states, which management calls its key competitive edge.
- Leased to “corporates of repute” - every square foot of leasable space has been consistently let out, with tenants drawn from third-party logistics, engineering and manufacturing companies, and e-commerce players who need warehouse space. The leases are non-cancellable for three to five years and can be renewed, so income is locked in.
- Built more to earn more - a new warehouse of roughly 41,000 square feet was finished during FY25 and immediately leased to an existing corporate tenant, with rent starting from July 2025. The company has stated plainly that it is concentrating on this rental business by constructing additional buildings to grow revenue.
- The risk is more supply - management acknowledges that if more warehouse developers enter with additional facilities, rental rates could come under pressure, though it believes its location advantage may cushion the impact.
2. Precision engineering: spare parts for a dying loom and new parts for new machines
It no longer builds complete weaving machines - the technology that killed them now defines the business - so it makes the replacement parts that keep the old looms running and precision components for machine tools.
- Legacy spares for a global installed base - the company originally manufactured High Speed Automatic ‘C’ type Shuttle Weaving Machines, but shuttleless technology wiped out demand for new ones, so it now identifies mills still using those looms, both in India and overseas, and supplies them with spares and accessories at competitive rates.
- Also makes parts for machine tools - the product range has expanded beyond textile spares to include tool holders and precision parts for machine tools, serving export-oriented units that order based on their own overseas contracts.
- No imported technology needed - the company has fully absorbed the manufacturing know-how for these spares and accessories and has not imported any new technology in the last three financial years, and the process is not energy intensive.
- Hunting for new sectors - after a turnover drop in FY25 caused by a broad engineering and textile recession, the company is actively working to identify supply opportunities in other industries, including automobiles, to diversify away from its shrinking core customer base.
Group structure and partners
A standalone listed company with no subsidiaries, controlled by a promoter group with deep textile roots and a shareholder register that still carries the names of its former joint-venture partners.
- No corporate pyramid - the company operates as a single entity with no holding, subsidiary, or associate companies, and its shares are listed only on the BSE in Mumbai.
- Promoters hold about a third - as of early 2020, the promoter group held roughly 33% of the equity, with key individuals being Chairman S. Pathy and Vice Chairperson Aishwarya Pathy, both also directors of The Lakshmi Mills Company.
- Notable non-promoter shareholders - the shareholder register has historically included ITEMA (Switzerland) Ltd with nearly 15%, Voltas Ltd with about 9%, and Lakshmi Machine Works Ltd with roughly 7%, reflecting old industrial relationships from the loom-manufacturing era.
- A related-party property deal - the Tirupur property acquired for the rental business was bought from The Lakshmi Mills Company, a related party, at a fair value of ₹265.50 Lakhs, with shareholder approval obtained at an extraordinary general meeting in December 2022.