The volatility seen in the previous week is expected to continue in the coming week ahead of the Budget 2021, while focus will also remain on quarterly earnings, experts say.
The BSE Sensex and Nifty50 ended the week around half a percent higher but the broader markets underperformed the frontliners, with the Nifty midcap index falling 1.2 percent and smallcap 0.6 percent.
Tata Motors | The stock jumped over 31 percent during the week on the back of improved sales in the domestic market and at UK subsidiary Jaguar Land Rover. CLSA has retained ‘buy’ rating with the target at Rs 270 per share. JLR Q3 retail volume improved 13 percent QoQ and the share of EVs rose to 12 percent. JLR retail sales were broadly in-line with the monthly tracker, it said. Retail sales for the quarter ending December 31, 2020 were 128,469 vehicles, 13.1 percent higher than the 113,569 vehicles sold in the preceding quarter but down 9 percent from the year-ago period.
Tata Elxsi | The share was up 15 percent after the company declared its Q3 results. Tata Elxsi said its net profit rose to Rs 105.2 crore for the December 2020 quarter against a net profit of Rs 75.4 crore in the year-ago period. Revenue from operations rose 12.7 percent to Rs 477.1 crore in Q3 from Rs 423.4 crore in the corresponding period last fiscal. Shrikant Chouhan, Executive Vice President, Equity Technical Research at Kotak Securities, said on the weekly charts, the stock formed a strong bullish candle along with modest volume activity, which suggests that the uptrend will continue in the short run.
DLF | The share price gained over 12 percent during the week. The construction of the second joint venture project between Hines, the international real estate firm, and DLF, the largest publicly listed real estate company in India, has commenced. Hines and DLF formed a joint venture in 2019 to develop an office complex in Phase-V, Udyog Vihar, NH – 48, Gurugram.
Bharti Airtel | The stock was up more than 11 percent. National Securities Depository Limited (NSDL) on January 12 had updated the foreign investment limit for Bharti Airtel from 49 percent to 100 percent. MSCI on January 14 said the proforma foreign ownership limit (FOL) and upward movement of the adjustment factor due to the foreign room would be implemented as part of the February 2021 Quarterly Index Review (QIR). Goldman Sachs has kept ‘buy’ rating on the stock with the target at Rs 645 per share.
CESC | The stock price rose 11 percent after the company reported a 25-percent on-year rise in consolidated net profit to Rs 328 crore for the December quarter. The company’s bottom line stood at Rs 263 crore in the corresponding period a year ago, it said in a regulatory filing. Revenue from operations rose during the quarter to Rs 2,539 crore against Rs 2,344 crore in the October-December quarter in 2019-20. CESC announced a record interim dividend of Rs 45 per share, entailing a payout of close to Rs 600 crore. It is the highest interim dividend in the history of the company.
Tata Chemicals | The share gained more than 6 percent last week. It gained on reports that the Tata Group commodity chemicals company was in advanced talks for Archean’s industrial salt unit. According to Bloomberg, Tata Chemicals is in talks to acquire the industrial salt unit of Archean Group that could value the business at Rs 450 crore ($ 61 million) at a minimum.
Firstsource Solutions | The stock was down over 10 percent in the week gone by. Data showed Rakesh Jhunjhunwala pared his stake in the company in the December quarter. Data released by the company on January 8 on BSE showed that Jhunjhunwala held 90,00,000 shares at the end of the June quarter against 2,00,00,000 shares that he held at the end of the September quarter. However, mutual funds and foreign portfolio investors raised their stake during the said quarter.
SAIL | The stock price was down over 8 percent with the government deciding to sell up to a 10 percent stake in the PSU through an offer for sale that is expected to fetch over Rs 2,600 crore.
Kotak Mahindra Bank | The share price declined 5 percent last week. Research firm CLSA is of the view that Kotak Mahindra Bank has been trading at a premium to the sector but with the recent move up, it is trading 10-20 percent higher than its three -year trading history and, on a relative basis, at a 35 percent premium to HDFC Bank, CNBC-TV18 reported. Kotak’s liability franchise has scaled up massively in the past four-five years. Today, its cost of funds is lower than the Top 3 private banks, CLSA said, saying that such an advantage enables the bank to build a low-risk loan book and allows it to compete profitably in low-yield segments such as mortgages/corporate loans, where the bank’s market share is just 2-3 percent.
Bajaj Electricals | The stock jumped 11 percent last week. ICRA reaffirmed long-term and short-term rating of the company’s line of credit, along with non-convertible debenture (NCD) programme of the company. The outlook on the said long-term and NCD rating has been revised to ‘stable’ from ‘negative’. “Demand continued to be robust since the last couple of quarters and I think Q3 has been no exception. Q3 had two festive months which were October and November, and we were expecting a sharp dip after Diwali but the industry continued to hold out well enough post-Diwali right through till December but the supply side and the cost pressures have reared themselves again. Therefore that has been the new challenge,” said Anuj Poddar, ED of Bajaj Electricals said in an interview with CNBC-TV18.
Sandip Das
