Amidst rising corporate governance concerns, the government has ordered an inspection into the books of Byju’s. There have been several governance issues like inordinate delays in submitting financials, a spate of resignations by auditors and board members as well as loan defaults. The government will take a call on further course of action after the findings of the inspection are out. Byju’s has also destroyed a lot of investor value with most of the top investors writing down their investment value in Byju’s by 50%.
For the June 2023 quarter, HDFC Bank reported 29.1% higher net profits at Rs12,370 crore. Of course, this only includes the numbers of HDFC Bank and not the merged entity. Net interest income (NII) grew by 21.1% on a yoy basis. Core net interest margin (NIM) stood at 4.1% for all assets and 4.3% for interest earning assets. Non-interest income spiked by nearly 50% yoy at Rs9,230 crore for the quarter. Apart from steady loan growth, the bank also saw sobering of its gross NPAs in the quarter and robust interest spread.
The merged HDFC Bank (including HDFC Ltd) relisted on the stock exchanges on Monday July 17, 2023 and settled with a market capitalization of $155 billion. It still remains the third most valuable company in India after Reliance and TCS. On Monday, 311 crore fresh shares issued to fund the merger also listed and started trading on the stock exchanges. Globally, HDFC Bank is now the seventh most valuable bank by market cap. Now its market cap is at par with HSBC and Wells Fargo and twice that of Citigroup Inc.
Proximus group has acquired 58% stake in Route Mobile for Rs5,922 crore, valuing the company at nearly Rs10,200 crore. Belgium based Proximus plans to take its stake in Route Mobile all the way up to 84%.The deal is priced at Rs1,626.40 per share, which is an 8% premium to the market price. This acquisition has triggered an offer for sale (OFS) to acquire an additional 26% as per SEBI regulations. Post the open offer, Proximus will hike its stake to nearly 84% in Route. This will enable Route to become a leader in CPAAS.
After walking out of the Vedanta deal, Foxconn will set up a Rs8,800 crore manufacturing facility in the state of Karnataka. Foxconn is one of the major iPhone assemblers for Apple. The facility will require about 100 acres of land and is likely to create 14,000 jobs. Foxconn had also signed up with Vedanta group to invest $19.5 billion to set up a semiconductor facility in Gujarat. However, Foxconn has opted out of that JV and will implement its India semiconductor plans independently by roping in Taiwanese tech partners.
Temasek, the Singapore based sovereign fund, has decided to sharply step up its India investments by $10 billion. This will be done over a period of the next 3 years. Temasek, is already present in India and nearly 6% of its overall corpus of around $300 billion is invested in India. Now it plans to deepen its engagement with Indian equities with focus on financial services, technology, consumer, and healthcare. In addition, Temasek will also explore new areas of investments in India like energy transition and decarbonization.
When the demerged financial services arm of Reliance Industries, Jio Financial Services, lists on July 20th, it will directly gain access to major indices. According to an NSE circular, Jio Financial would be directly included in Nifty 50, Nifty 100, Nifty 200 and the Nifty 500 indices apart from a number of sectoral indices with an oil & gas tilt. Incidentally, July 20 is the record date to officially determine who is eligible to get shares of Jio Financial services so July 19, 2023 will be the last cum-date. RIL shares were trading higher.
GQG Partners, which became famous for its multi-billion dollar investment in the Adani group at the peak of the Hindenburg crisis, has found a new target investment. GQG invested Rs2,400 crore in the Patanjali Foods OFS acquiring 21.5 million shares at a price of Rs1,103.80 per share. The value of GQG’s investment of $2 billion in Adani group is now up nearly 50% at $3 billion. In addition, GQG also has exposure to other Indian stocks like HDFC (pre-merger), ITC, ICICI Bank, SBI, Sun Pharma, Bharti Airtel, JSW Steel, and L&T.