- lead - Knowledge Marine & Engineering Works is one of India’s only listed pure-play dredging companies - a business that started in 2015 as a small ship-repair unit with a team of just over 40 people and has grown, over a decade, into an integrated platform that designs, builds, owns, deploys and maintains its own fleet of dredgers, tugs and support vessels. The company was founded by the first generation of the Kewalramani and Daswani families, and its entire evolution is held together by one recurring discipline: it invests in new vessels and infrastructure only after it has already won the contract that will pay for them, and it bids only for work that clears its return thresholds. That approach - backward-integrate into shipbuilding to lower the cost of growing the fleet, then deploy that fleet on long-term government contracts - explains how a repair shop became a dredging powerhouse and is now building its own shipyard.
Business segments
Three engines at different stages - a dredging cash cow that does the heavy lifting, a chartering business that turns port support into predictable multi-year income, and a shipbuilding arm that is both a cost advantage for the group and a growing contractor to the government - each built with the cash flows of the one before.
1. Dredging: the foundation that moves earth and earns the bulk of revenue
KMEW removes sediment and rock from ports, rivers and harbours under contracts where it gets paid for every cubic metre excavated - and it owns the fleet, so it captures the margin instead of renting the tools.
- Paid by the project, not the day - the company earns revenue through fixed-scope contracts awarded by port authorities and Dredging Corporation of India, typically lasting one to three years for maintenance work and specific durations for capital projects, which means income is lumpy but tied to defined deliverables.
- The fleet is the moat - with 19 dredgers as of FY26, including 9 cutter suction dredgers that operate in rivers with a draft of just 2.5-3 metres, the company can bid for shallow inland waterway jobs that larger port-oriented dredgers cannot physically access.
- Rock dredging is the differentiator - KMEW has handled ultra-hard rock exceeding 170 MPa compressive strength at depths up to 16 metres, including a ₹50 crore contract at JNPA where previous attempts by others had failed, and a ₹78 crore rock dredging job at Mangrol Fishing Harbour for the Government of Gujarat.
- Inland waterways are a quiet giant - the company holds a 26% share of the 365-kilometre Haldia-Varanasi stretch on National Waterway-1 and has secured contracts from the Inland Waterways Authority of India totalling ₹171.2 crore, giving it a foothold in a market where roughly 100 million cubic metres of annual dredging happens for inland waterways.
- Sand mining turns waste into a second revenue stream - in Bahrain, through its subsidiary Knowledge Dredging Co., KMEW extracts marine sand and sells it to construction companies instead of disposing of it, with a cumulative order book of ₹383 crores over five years and 60% of output locked into fixed sale agreements.
2. Marine chartering: a toll booth inside India’s ports
KMEW owns a fleet of 27 tugs, pilot boats, patrol boats and support vessels that it hires out to port authorities on contracts lasting up to 15 years - so revenue is visible long before the vessel touches the water.
- Long contracts, predictable cash flows - charter agreements span 3 to 7 years, and the company typically repays the debt on a vessel before the contract even ends, which aligns its liabilities with its revenue streams.
- Green tugs are the next wave - KMEW has secured two 15-year green tug contracts from V.O.C. Port and Vishakhapatnam Port worth a combined ₹650 crores, positioning it among a handful of domestic players in India’s Green Tug Transition Program, which aims to replace diesel harbour tugs with battery-electric alternatives across all major ports by 2040.
- Broke into a near-monopoly - the company’s entry into the 60-ton bollard pull tug segment disrupted a market that was previously dominated by a handful of players, and it has since secured a ₹34.69 crore, seven-year contract from Mumbai Port Authority for two dock tugs.
- 100% utilisation is the norm - the company reports that its entire port ancillary fleet is fully utilised, which means every vessel is earning under a contract at any given time.
3. Shipbuilding and repair: the cost advantage that feeds the other two engines
KMEW designs and builds its own dredgers, tugs and patrol boats - so when it wins a dredging or chartering contract, it can supply the vessel from its own yard instead of paying a third-party builder’s margin.
- Bought, not just built - the company’s formal entry into shipbuilding came through the acquisition of Kamal Marine & Engineering Works, whose facilities can build and refit fast patrol boats, pilot launches, survey crafts and mooring boats, giving KMEW in-house capacity it previously rented from yards in Kolkata, Vizag and Goa.
- A shipyard of its own - the company has acquired 15 acres of waterfront land at Saphale in Maharashtra, with a further 5-acre expansion option, to develop a shipyard with roughly 180 metres of river frontage and a natural slipway; the phased plan starts with workboats and tugs and eventually scales to large vessels and floating dry docks.
- Government orders are the anchor - the shipbuilding unit is executing orders from government and port authorities for fast patrol and pilot launches, and 75% of materials are sourced domestically under Atmanirbhar Bharat guidelines.
- Capex discipline applies here too - the company uses joint ventures and existing facilities to avoid upfront capital spending in shipbuilding, and it builds vessels only against confirmed orders, the same philosophy that governs its dredging and chartering investments.
Group structure and partners
KMEW operates through a web of subsidiaries in India and Bahrain, with a stated strategy of buying out minority stakes and merging entities to simplify the corporate structure.
- The Indian subsidiaries include Knowledge Shipyard (which holds the Saphale land), Kamal Marine & Engineering Works (shipbuilding and repair), and two dredging entities - Indian Ports Dredging and Knowledge Infra Ports - both of which the Board has approved to merge into the parent company, with an appointed date of 1 April 2025, subject to NCLT approval.
- In Bahrain, Knowledge Dredging Co. holds a sand mining licence - the first granted to an Indian entity - and Knowledge Marine Co. handles water transportation and marketing; together they generated revenues of ₹45.76 crores in the year to March 2025.
- The company also has a branch office in Yangon, Myanmar, established to execute the Sittwe Port project, and a joint venture with Sahara Dredging for the Myanmar contract where KMEW is the lead partner.
- KMEW migrated from the BSE SME platform to the Main Board of both BSE and NSE in November 2024, and subsequently the board approved the subdivision of each share of face value ₹10 into two shares of ₹5 each on December 24, 2024.