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The odd thing about India’s stock market rally is just how little faith investors have in it.
The Nifty 50 Index is barely 2% away from its all-time intraday high, but unlike the S&P 500 Index, which has closed at records 13 times this year, the Indian benchmark is struggling to break free of scepticism.
Given the froth in markets globally, some nervousness is to be expected. Yet what prevails elsewhere is an eerie confidence. Option prices on national benchmarks in Japan, China, Germany, the UK and the US are all signaling more carefree abandon than contracts on the Nifty, for which the one-month implied volatility is a mere 0.64 standard deviation below its three-year average.
Foreign investors put a net $3 billion into Indian stocks last year, compared with a $43 billion deluge into domestic mutual funds. Local liquidity is strong because the government’s November ban on high-denomination banknotes has dented demand for property and gold. Limited appetite for assets that are bought and sold for cash has left stocks as the only option for wealth owners.
Barring software and pharmaceutical exporters, which are bogged down by concerns about US President Donald Trump’s policies on immigration and imports, nothing in the Indian index is cheap.
If pessimists’ wait for a tumble gets longer, put it down to special situations. Shares of Reliance Industries Ltd got a boost recently when Jio, the company’s new fourth-generation mobile network, went from being a freebie to a paid service. Reliance Jio’s entry sent a retreating Telenor ASA into the arms of India’s mobile market leader Bharti Airtel Ltd, while Vodafone Group Plc is getting the local public listing it’s long craved by agreeing to merge with Idea Cellular Ltd.
All this comes at a time when big-ticket dealmaking by India Inc. is five to 10 years in the past. Tata Steel Ltd’s $12 billion acquisition of Corus Group Plc’s steel assets, and Hindalco Industries Ltd’s $5.7 billion takeover of Atlanta-based Novelis Inc., are of a 2007 vintage. Vedanta Resources Plc bought a stake in oil producer Cairn India in 2011.
A fresh cycle began only last year, with billionaire Kumar Mangalam Birla starting to reorganize his cement-to-telecom empire, and a $13 billion sale of Essar Oil Ltd by the Ruia brothers. Last month, Tata Steel agreed to offload its UK specialty steels unit to
Liberty House Group to pare debt, and now the government in New Delhi is seeking to merge a state-owned oil
explorer with a refiner.
What will all this mean for shareholders? Take telecom. As consolidation cuts carriers’ spectrum costs, the debt overhang in India’s wireless industry should ease. A similar scenario may play out in everything from banks to steel and infrastructure, cement and real estate. As Morgan Stanley notes, industries with the least pricing power are prime
candidates for M&A activity.
That offers hope for a revival in returns on equity. Shrinking corporate profitability is the main reason why total gains for the 75 biggest non-finance companies on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) have slumped from an average 18% five years ago to 13%. With less leverage and improved earnings, a growing stock-market rally in India should gather more believers than cynics.
— Bloomberg
Andy Mukherjee is a Bloomberg Gadfly columnist covering industrial companies and financial services