A day after the aggressive bid for Bhushan Steel submitted by Tata Steel, the markets clearly showed disappointment pulling the stock down by nearly 7%. Tata Steel agreed to pay nearly Rs.70,000 crore for Bhushan Steel and Bhushan Power put together, which was way above the bid placed by the other contender, JSW Steel. The acquisition of Bhushan Steel and Bhushan Power will add a total of 8.1 million tonnes to Tata Steel’s capacity and outdo JSW by a margin. In fact, post the acquisition, Tata Steel will have a total steel capacity that will be marginally higher than SAIL too.
The Serious Frauds Investigation Office (SFIO) is to investigate into alleged irregularities by Fortis and Religare, especially with respect to the funds moved out from these companies by the Singh Brothers of Ranbaxy. The two Singh brothers are rumoured to have taken out $78 million from Fortis without shareholder approval. The Singapore Court has ordered the Singh brothers to pay Rs.3500 crore in damages to Dai-Ichi for non disclosure of sensitive and relevant information to the Japanese acquirer. Lenders are already free to sell the pledged shares of the Singh brothers.
Just a week after the NSE and the BSE denied data sales to global exchanges, the SGX has already laid out plans to list its products in the GIFT City in Gujarat by August this year. The idea of banning data sales was to avoid the export of derivative volumes to global exchanges. Now SGX Nifty, which will have to stop trading at SGX from August, will be replaced by the trading of SGX Nifty on the GIFT City with the same benefits like dollar denomination and exemption from STT and other statutory charges. Whether it creates the same amount of volumes and institutional interest remains to be seen.
Soon after hanging his boots after a long stock at Templeton, iconic fund manager Mark Mobius, has expressed hope that India would outperform China in the coming years. Indian GDP growth had threatened to outpace China 2 years back but the introduction of demonetization had queered the pitch and subdued India’s GDP growth to below Chinese levels. Mobius also sees tremendous potential in mid cap and small cap stocks where he sees tremendous evidence of Indian entrepreneurship. Mobius is extremely bullish on technology, FinTech and robotics in the Indian context.
Even as the imbroglio over the Nirav Modi scam continues, the defaulter himself has admitted that his liability to the PNB is just to the tune of Rs.5000 crore. Nirav Modi also indicated that the decision of PNB to go public with the whole case had worsened the situation and made a resolution to the problem impossible. Nirav Modi claimed that the decision by PNB to go public resulted in a search and seizure operation by the CBI and the ED making it impossible for the Nirav Modi group to honour its debt. Modi also opined that he could have easily raised Rs.6500 crore by selling his India business but now that was not possible due to his accounts and his businesses being frozen. The case appears to have reached a dead end with both Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi having fled Indian shores.
It has now emerged that Apple is Warren Buffett’s largest single holding now and is marginally larger than his exposure to Wells Fargo. Buffett’s stake in Apple is currently valued at $28 billion. In the last couple of years, Buffett had substantially built up a stake in IBM but recently he had almost entirely exited his stake in IBM due to its underperformance in the stock markets. Almost the entire Apple stake of Buffett has been built only in the last 2 years. It may be recollected that for a very long time, Warren Buffett had been sceptical of technology stories; saying that he did not understand them.
