GFCL EV Products: Two Sets of Numbers Are Circulating. Only One Belongs to the Company You'd Be Buying.

Two sets of financials circulate for GFCL EV Products, and they are not close to each other.

One shows FY25 revenue of ₹4,853 crore, EBITDA margins of 25%, profit after tax of ₹546 crore and a price-to-earnings ratio near 62. The other, taken from the company's audited annual report, shows FY25 revenue of ₹9.44 crore and a loss of ₹27.01 crore.

Both are real numbers. They belong to different companies.

The first set is Gujarat Fluorochemicals Limited, the listed parent, which reported consolidated FY25 revenue of roughly ₹4,737 crore. The second is GFCL EV Products Limited, its subsidiary, and the entity whose unlisted shares change hands at around ₹40. The names are nearly identical and the parent consolidates the subsidiary, so the distinction gets lost easily. It shouldn't be, because the entire investment case turns on it.

A price-to-earnings ratio cannot be calculated for GFCL EV Products at all. The company has never reported a profit.

What the audited accounts actually say

₹ crore, consolidated	FY25	FY26
Revenue from operations	9.44	33.22
Other income	20.92	4.83
Cost of materials consumed	27.98	72.73
Finance costs	2.65	16.63
Depreciation	22.52	28.98
Loss after tax	(27.01)	(104.31)
Loss per share (₹)	(0.04)	(0.14)

Management's own description, in the notice to the fifth annual general meeting, is blunt: "During FY 2025-26, the Company recorded revenue of approximately Rs. 33 Crores and an EBITDA loss of approximately Rs. 70 Crores."

The auditors put a harder number on it. Under the Companies (Auditor's Report) Order, they record that the company incurred cash losses of ₹72.02 crore in FY26 and ₹7.89 crore in FY25. Cash burn rose roughly ninefold in a year.

One further detail worth catching: FY25's headline "revenue" of about ₹30 crore, quoted by several data services, was total income, of which ₹20.92 crore was interest earned on cash the parent had injected. Product sales were ₹9.44 crore. As that cash went into the ground, other income fell to ₹4.83 crore.

The one number: ₹2.20 of raw material for every ₹1 of sales

The company sold ₹33.22 crore of product in FY26 and consumed ₹72.73 crore of raw material doing it.

In most industries that would be alarming. In battery materials it is what qualification looks like. Cell manufacturers put new suppliers through long approval cycles, running trial batches and rejecting output until consistency is proven. Yields are poor by design, because the point is passing the test rather than earning a margin.

So the ratio is not a red flag by itself. What it does is locate the company precisely: pre-commercial, not scaling.

The part almost nobody mentions: who the customer is

Here is where the accounts become genuinely surprising.

Of ₹33.22 crore of revenue, the related-party note shows ₹17.34 crore of goods sold to Gujarat Fluorochemicals itself, plus a further ₹0.74 crore of other sales. Just over half the revenue is sales to the parent.

The traffic runs the other way too. The company bought ₹71.86 crore of goods, power and fuel from GFL, against total material and power costs of roughly ₹87 crore. It also paid the parent ₹10.93 crore of project manpower cost, ₹3.53 crore of shared services and ₹0.68 crore of rent, and owed it ₹90.42 crore in trade payables at year-end, an amount larger than the entire year's revenue.

The accounts state these transactions are in the ordinary course of business and on an arm's-length basis, and the auditors did not qualify their opinion. Take that at face value. The point for an investor is different: the great majority of what GFCL EV buys comes from its parent, and just over half of what it sells goes back to it. Strip that out and third-party commercial traction in FY26 was closer to ₹15 crore.

Three external customers accounted for ₹28.15 crore between them. By geography, India contributed ₹23.02 crore, the USA ₹5.79 crore, the rest of Asia ₹4.07 crore and Europe ₹0.33 crore. That US line is arguably the most encouraging figure in the whole file, because it is demand from outside the group entirely.

GFCL EV isn't building a battery company

It is trying to build the chemical infrastructure underneath one. That distinction matters, because it changes what you should be tracking.

The portfolio spans electrolyte salts, electrolyte formulations and additives, LFP cathode active material, PVDF and PTFE binders, sodium hexafluorophosphate for emerging sodium-ion chemistries, LiFSI, and natural graphite anode material. The ambition is not one battery component but several layers of the value chain at once.

The parent supplies something a typical clean-tech startup cannot buy: an existing fluorochemical ecosystem, manufacturing infrastructure, and backward integration into fluorine-based raw materials including a captive fluorspar mine in Morocco.

That could become the moat. It is not automatically a moat, because in battery materials, making the chemical is only half the job. Getting the customer to trust it is the other half.

The scoreboard: where each product actually stands

This is the part investors should be watching, and it is more granular than any headline suggests. Gujarat Fluorochemicals' investor presentation filed with the exchanges in February 2026 sets out where each line sits.

Product	Stage
LiPF6 electrolyte salt	Commercial supply since December 2025; facilities audited and qualified by key customers; repeat orders received
PVDF / PTFE binders	Qualification ongoing; commercial business expected in the first half of FY27
Electrolyte formulations	Samples with Indian cell manufacturers for evaluation
LFP cathode active material	Plant commissioned and stabilised; samples dispatched; awaiting customer approvals. Revenue guided to FY28

Read as one picture, the factories exist, the chemistry exists and the capital exists, but most of the portfolio has not yet reached commercial revenue.

So the bottleneck is not whether GFCL EV can manufacture battery materials. Increasingly the answer to that looks like yes. The harder question is how fast material moves through four quite different stages: sample, qualification, commercial order, repeat order.

LiPF6 is the only line that has completed all four. That matters more than it might appear, because a sample is not revenue, an audit is not revenue, and even a qualification is not necessarily revenue. A repeat order is the first thing that resembles a business. If that journey repeats across electrolytes, binders and cathode material, the revenue curve changes shape. That "if" is carrying a great deal of weight.

The balance sheet, and the capital still to come

₹ crore, consolidated	FY25	FY26
Property, plant and equipment	480.42	781.05
Capital work-in-progress	620.45	1,021.41
Inventories	88.19	188.53
Borrowings	Nil	640.26
Total assets	1,665.02	2,806.69
Capital commitments outstanding	383.15	451.93

Three lines deserve attention.

Finished goods inventory stands at ₹49.62 crore against annual revenue of ₹33.22 crore. More than a year of sales is sitting in the warehouse, with inventory turnover of 0.24 times. Production is running well ahead of shipment, which is exactly what you would expect from a plant that has been commissioned but not yet fully qualified.

Borrowings went from nil to ₹640.26 crore, putting debt to equity at 0.42. Until this year the ramp was funded almost entirely with parent equity.

And the ₹1,021 crore sitting in capital work-in-progress earns nothing yet and carries no depreciation yet. When those assets commission, depreciation steps up hard against a revenue line currently at ₹33 crore. That is the mechanical reason losses are likely to widen before they narrow, whatever the quality of execution.

Then there is the number that dwarfs everything else. The Board's report states the company is "backed by a planned capex of ~Rs. 6,000 Crores over the next 2-3 years," which includes a greenfield battery materials project in Oman that management has previously sized at roughly $216 million. Against a balance sheet of ₹2,807 crore and revenue of ₹33 crore, that is the real scale of what still has to be funded.

In FY26 the group burned ₹177 crore in operations and ₹823 crore in capital spending, covered by ₹1,112 crore raised: ₹92.47 crore of fresh equity from GFL, ₹430 crore of Series A preference shares from the International Finance Corporation, and ₹345 crore of new borrowing.

The IFC's participation is a serious signal. The World Bank's private-sector arm does not underwrite lightly, and it ran diligence no private buyer could. It is also a future dilution consideration, since those shares are compulsorily convertible on a variable ratio.

The 3% float that sets the price

Gujarat Fluorochemicals owns 96.89% of this company. As recently as FY24 it owned 100%. This private market is barely a year old.

Everything trading is the remaining 3.11%. Share count stood at 7,32,99,72,576 at March 2026, rising to 7,38,71,15,432 after warrants converted at ₹35 in May 2026. At dealer quotes between ₹39.62 and ₹41.87, implied market capitalisation runs roughly ₹29,000 to ₹31,000 crore, against book value of ₹2.06 per share and audited return on equity of -6.50%.

Watch how the quote behaves. One dealer showed a day's volume of 500 shares. Two dealers quoted ₹39.62 and ₹41.87 within days of each other, a spread of over 5% on the same security. Worth correcting one figure that circulates: the all-time high on these shares is around ₹56, with the 52-week range roughly ₹39 to ₹53. Higher historical prices sometimes quoted do not appear in any dealer record.

Three separate valuations, all near ₹35

GFL subscribed fresh equity at ₹35 per share. Warrant holders converted at ₹35. And for the employee options granted in July 2025, the company's Black-Scholes model used a fair value of ₹35.40 per share.

None of these is a market-clearing price. Placement pricing follows valuation reports rather than an auction, and an option-pricing input is not a quote. But three independent exercises, performed for three different purposes, all landed near ₹35 while the private market asks ₹40 or more.

Governance is thinner than the price implies

The secretarial audit report for FY26 records four instances of non-compliance. The company was required to have at least two independent directors and had one. The audit committee's composition did not comply with Section 177(2). The nomination and remuneration committee's composition did not comply with Section 178(1). No independent director attended the annual general meeting.

Alongside sixteen board meetings during the year, the audit committee met once.

There has also been churn in the finance seat. The chief financial officer resigned in January 2026, a successor was appointed the same day, that successor resigned in May 2026, and the original CFO was reappointed. Three changes in four months.

Some of this is being fixed, and notably it is the IFC applying the pressure. The shareholders' agreement requires a Big Five audit firm, and the long-standing auditor resigned specifically so Walker Chandiok & Co LLP could be appointed. A second independent director joined in May 2026 and both committees were reconstituted. These are real improvements, arriving after the year under review rather than during it.

The case for

The industrial logic is strong and the company is not merely announcing it. Management describes India's first fully integrated battery materials facility, with operational plants for LiPF6, binders and electrolyte audited and approved by global customers, and an LFP cathode plant it calls among the first commercial-scale facilities outside China built by a non-Chinese player.

The breadth of chemistry reduces the risk of backing the wrong technology. Backward integration through the parent, down to fluorspar, is genuinely hard to replicate. LiPF6 has cleared the full path to repeat orders. The IFC has committed ₹430 crore, an Omani partner took 24% of the Oman manufacturing entity, and the group employed 734 people at year-end. The qualification cycles that make today's numbers look poor are the same barrier that protects the position once cleared.

The case against

Losses widened from ₹27.01 crore to ₹104.31 crore, and cash losses ninefold. Just over half of revenue is sales to the parent, and most inputs are bought from it. Finished goods exceed a year of sales. ₹6,000 crore of capex is planned against a ₹2,807 crore balance sheet. Debt has appeared for the first time. Governance was non-compliant on four counts through the year. And a deferred tax asset of ₹24.02 crore has been recognised against accumulated losses on the strength of projected future profits, a judgement that has to come good.

There is a subtler risk too, and it is the one investors most often miss in this theme. Strategic importance and commercial profitability are not the same thing. A material can be genuinely critical to India's supply chain, genuinely difficult to make, and still earn a poor return on capital if Chinese producers price aggressively. Being the alternative to China is a strong narrative. It only becomes a strong investment if the economics survive the comparison.

What actually needs to happen

The single forward metric worth watching is utilisation. A chemical plant built for future volumes looks inefficient when running far below capacity, and that is not a red flag on its own. The danger is that the factories fill up more slowly than they were built.

Concretely, three things: LiPF6 repeat orders need to grow; electrolyte, binder and cathode qualifications need to convert into commercial volumes on something like the guided FY27 and FY28 timelines; and third-party revenue needs to grow faster than parent revenue, so that the top line stops depending on the group. Raw material cost falling below revenue would be the first honest sign that qualification has given way to production.

The part most buyers seem to skip

Gujarat Fluorochemicals owns 96.89% of this company, and Gujarat Fluorochemicals is listed.

An investor who wants the ₹4,853 crore business with 25% EBITDA margins can buy it on the exchange today, with daily liquidity, quarterly disclosure and a clean exit. That is the company those circulating financials actually describe, and it is also the entity on the other side of half this subsidiary's sales and most of its purchases.

Buying the unlisted 3.11% gets exposure to the pre-revenue subsidiary instead, without any of those three protections, at a price set by 500-share days. The question isn't whether the business is real. It's whether you know which company's numbers you're underwriting.

The bottom line

GFCL EV Products is not yet an earnings story. It is an execution story, and the unlisted buyer is making a forward bet on a specific sequence: qualification, then utilisation, then profitability. The first stage has been cleared on one product line and is still in progress on the rest.

That makes the company genuinely interesting and genuinely difficult to value. When a business is this hard to value, the useful exercise is not arriving at a target price. It is identifying the few assumptions that decide the outcome. Here there is really one: how long it takes for the factories to fill up. That will matter more than India's EV sales numbers.

The opportunity looks real. Before underwriting it, check that the numbers in front of you carry the right company's name.

Sources: Financial figures are from GFCL EV Products Limited's FY2025-26 annual report (CIN U24296GJ2021PLC127819), including the statutory auditors' report and CARO statements, the secretarial audit report, and the related-party and segment notes. Product-stage detail is from Gujarat Fluorochemicals' February 2026 investor presentation filed with the exchanges. Gujarat Fluorochemicals' FY25 consolidated revenue is as reported by the company. Price, float and dealer-spread data are from unlisted-share dealer platforms; these are indicative over-the-counter reference prices and vary between platforms and between transactions.

This is not investment advice. Consult a SEBI-registered investment adviser before making any investment decision.