A penny stock can be defined by price rather than by size – any share trading below ₹100. This definition catches a wider range of companies than the phrase suggests.
It includes NMDC, one of India’s largest iron ore miners. It includes Motherson Sumi Wiring. But it also includes genuinely tiny businesses whose shares barely trade.
This shows that price alone tells you nothing about quality. Equitymaster applies the basic quality filters of return on equity, return on capital, debt to equity, dividend payout, and such.
Here are low-priced stocks with strong order books. In the vast universe of stocks trading under ₹100, only 46 companies cleared the filters applied. Most did not have an order book at all. Only a few of them did, and many also defined themselves as order-driven. Please note that it is not unusual for companies of this size, and it is not a reason to dismiss them.
#1 Tara Chand Infralogistic Solutions
This is the only company on this list that publishes a proper order book, and the one whose recent quarter shows why order books are not the whole story.
Tara Chand provides cargo handling, equipment rental, warehousing, and steel processing across 22 states from five stockyards, with a fleet of 430 machines.
As of July 2026, its executable FY27 order book stood at ₹205 crore, with 74% coming from equipment rentals and specialised services and 26% from warehousing and transportation. Its management has guided to 20-25% revenue growth for FY27 and capex of ₹800 m to ₹1 bn.
The June 2026 quarter itself was mixed. Its revenue rose 11% to ₹67.6 crore, but EBITDA fell to ₹21 crore from ₹23.1 crore, taking the margin down to 30.7% from 37.4%. The profit after tax dropped to ₹1.7 crore from ₹6.5 crore.
The management attributed that to prior-period items and a client-led change in project scope that left specialised-services equipment idle, with that segment’s margin roughly halving to about 10% from its usual 18%.
The equipment rental margin also slipped to 54% from the usual 58-62% because utilization fell to about 79%.
The company’s cash profit was ₹17.6 crore, down only 6%, which is a very different picture from the 74% fall in reported profit, and the difference is depreciation on a growing fleet. Its net debt to equity improved to 0.87 times from 0.92 times.
Overall, this is a business investing heavily in assets while its accounting profit swings. That is normal for equipment rental.
#2 Deepak Builders & Engineers India
In July 2026, the company received a letter of acceptance for an EPC project worth ₹549 crore, covering civil work, mechanical, electrical, and plumbing services, horticulture and site development, to be executed over 36 months.
For a company of this size, a single order of that value is transformational if it converts.
Deepak Builders is a construction and EPC contractor with a return on equity of 20.3% and return on capital employed of 25.9%, at a debt to equity ratio of 0.32.
The company split its equity shares from a face value of ₹10 to Re 1, taking the share count from about 10.4 million to 103.8 million.
So anyone comparing today’s price to historical charts, or to the IPO price, needs to adjust for that. A screen that picks up the post-split price without context will show a very different company from the one that listed.
The other thing to check before acting on the order book is the difference between a letter of acceptance and revenue.
EPC contracts of this length face land, clearance and payment risk throughout, and a 36-month execution period means the bulk of the revenue arrives in FY28 and FY29 rather than this year.
#3 Servotech Renewable Power System
Servotech is the fastest-growing business of the five. But its order disclosure is the least satisfying.
Servotech makes EV chargers, solar solutions, and battery energy storage systems. It’s a leading provider of solar solutions, including solar inverters, power backup UPS, LED lighting, and UVC disinfection products.
The company in collaboration with National Solar Energy Federation of India (NSEFI) has inaugurated Delhi's first grid-connected solar-powered EV charging carport.
Servotech has also partnered with Electra EV to develop India's first fast-charging interoperability solutions between GB/T and CCS2 protocols.
The company’s June 2026 quarter was strong on every reported line: consolidated revenue rose 57.7% to ₹216 crore, EBITDA jumped 93.4% to ₹20.9 crore, and profit after tax rose 74.5% to ₹7.9 crore.
The order flow behind it is real. The company signed a ₹400 crore memorandum of understanding with the Haryana government in June 2026 to expand manufacturing.
It won a 1,415 KW rooftop solar order from South Central Railway, a ₹73.7 crore solar contract from NREDCAP, and an EV charger order from oil marketing companies and PSUs covering 375 units of 60 KW chargers and 48 of 120 KW.
The company’s management says it has secured 67% of the PSU and OMC DC fast-charger tenders.
On its earnings call, management described the order book as robust and backed by confirmed purchase orders from government projects, without quantifying it.
Do note that a memorandum of understanding with a state government is an intention to invest, not an order to be executed. The management has been clear that it prioritises meeting customer requirements over margin improvement.
#4 GTV Engineering
GTV Engineering is a heavy engineering and fabrication business operating since 1978, supplying original equipment manufacturers in cement, thermal power, hydro power, steel, mining, and infrastructure.
It has the second-highest return on equity of the five at 26.4% and a return on capital employed of 28.5%, at modest debt. The FY26 income was ₹103 crore with profit after tax of ₹14.2 crore, up from ₹11 crore in FY25.
The company describes itself as operating on an order-book driven basis, and it discloses individual wins, such as a ₹175 m letter of intent for mill static parts, a separating wheel and a gap-type seal, to be executed over seven months.
What GTV also does, unusually and to its credit, is explain its own volatility.
The management has noted that quarterly performance varies with project execution schedules, customer inspections, dispatch clearances, and logistics availability, and that certain fourth-quarter dispatches were deferred because of temporary labour and vehicle constraints.
In a business where a single deferred dispatch moves a quarter, one bad quarter carries far less information than it would at a larger company.
Rajoo Engineers has the best quality metrics of the five on this list, and the clearest example of order book converting into revenue.
It makes plastic extrusion machinery from Rajkot and is debt-free, with a return on equity of 25.9% and return on capital employed of 34.9%.
The June 2026 quarter delivered consolidated revenue of ₹123 crore, up 44.7%, and profit after tax of ₹17.4 crore, up 15.5%, on what management described as strong execution, timely customer deliveries, and healthy global demand.
The sequential rebound from the March quarter supports the view that the company can convert its order book into deliveries when manufacturing throughput and logistics are stable.
There is a structural tailwind as well. Rajoo’s Lamina sheet extrusion technology serves solar module manufacturing through EVA and POE sheet lines, and India is targeting 500 GW of renewable capacity by 2030 with about 280 GW expected from solar.
That said, margins need to be watched carefully. The operating margin fell 418 basis points YoY to 17.65% and profit margin fell 356 basis points to 14.1% (YoY). Also, employee costs rose to ₹8.5 crore from ₹5.7 crore.
Conclusion
A similar pattern runs through four of these five names. Revenue is growing faster than profit, and margins are compressing.
That is what expansion looks like from the inside, and in small companies, it’s more pronounced because there is less scale to absorb it.
Also, a price below ₹100 tells you nothing about a company. Besides these five clear quality filters, each has some genuine visibility on future revenue.
But the usual caution about this segment of the market applies. These are small companies where a single deferred dispatch moves a quarter, liquidity is thinner than it looks on a normal trading day, and the exit is narrower than the entrance.
As always, evaluate each company’s business quality, financial performance, management execution, corporate governance, and valuation as key factors before drawing any investment conclusions.
Disclaimer: This article is for information purposes only. It is not a stock recommendation and should not be treated as such.
This article is syndicated from Equitymaster.com