The stock of Reliance Industries surged more than 7% on Monday to touch a life-time high. The market cap of Reliance stands at over Rs19.50 trillion (approximately $235 billion). The spike in Reliance stock came after the collapse of the Zee-Sony merger deal led to Zee opting out of the deal with Disney. In a report, Bloomberg had underlined that, in the absence of that deal, the assets of Disney India would be valued at $4.5 billion instead of $10 billion, the value at which Reliance / Disney deal was likely to be set.
Bajaj Finance, India’s leading non-banking finance company (NBFC), had another stellar quarter in Q3FY24, reporting a 22.4% rise in net profits at Rs3,639 crore for the quarter ending December 2023. This is slightly lower than the street estimates of Rs3,756 crore. That was largely because the company had to set aside more money for bad and doubtful loans in the quarter. These are consolidated numbers of Bajaj Finance, including subsidiaries; Bajaj Housing Finance and Bajaj Financial Securities. NII and NIM was steady in Q3.
According to a report by Care Edge, Passenger Vehicles (PV) volumes are expected to grow 8-10% in FY24 as pent-up demand abates with a hike in vehicle prices. This is a sharp contrast to the earlier estimates provided by Care Edge of 18% growth for PV sales volumes. For the 9 months to December 2024, the PV segment saw domestic sales grow at 7.4%. However, Care Edge has projected that PV sales volumes will continue to grow in the next fiscal. This will be driven by strong order books and smoother supply chains.
GAIL (India) Ltd reported a 10-fold jump in net profits for Q3FY24 at Rs2,843 crore. Growth was robust across verticals like gas transportation, marketing, and petrochemicals. Net profits were also higher on a sequential basis compared to Rs2,405 crore in the second quarter of FY24. Most of the thrust to profits came from a 3-fold increase in pre-tax earnings of the gas transportation business. Natural gas marketing and petrochemicals vertical saw turnaround in Q3FY24. Net revenues in Q3 were flat at Rs34,253 crore.
Amidst a severe cash crunch and pressure on all fronts, Think and Learn (the holding company of Byju’s), approved raising $200 million via rights issue to its equity shareholders. The irony was that the rights issue is being done at a steep discount of 99% to the last valuation of Byju’s. The funds raised will be exclusively utilised to clear immediate liabilities and meet operational expenses. However, lenders to Byju’s have approached the NCLT to pre-empt this move; as this would virtually make the bond holdings worthless.
Amidst the job drought in large cap IT companies, there is some good news. Five mid cap IT companies have increased their net headcount in Q3FY24. This is in contrast to the Big-4 IT companies reducing the workforce by over 21,000 personnel. Among the mid-tier IT companies; Tata Elxsi added 1,614 employees in Q3 while Cyient added 985 employees in this period. According to IT analysts, some mid cap IT firms are hiring, since they did not over hire in last 3 years, in contrast to the recruitment overdrive in Big-IT.
Bharat Petroleum Corporation (BPCL) reported 82.1% higher net profits for Q3FY24 at Rs3,181 crore. The revenues from operations were lower by 2.5% at Rs129,985 crore. While revenues were higher than street estimates, the net profits were sharply lower than consensus estimates. Profit growth came from spike in marketing margins amidst lower crude oil prices. This does not include the impact of the Red Sea crisis and that is likely to be felt in Q4FY24. Refining margins were stable, but market margins gave a big boost. The mutual fund new fund offerings (NFO) mobilization was relatively flat in 2023, and nowhere close to calendar 2021. A total sum of Rs63,854 crore was mobilized across 212 NFOs in 2023. That will classify as disappointing numbers amidst the Nifty and Sensex touching lifetime highs. However, NFOs are just part of the MF inflows story and the real story is in SIP flows, which is now at more than Rs16,700 crore per month. The MF bias towards financialization of savings is real and trend was underlined post pandemic.