stock market: PB Fintech block deal may stir short-term volatility, long-term story intact: Hemang Jani

“Talking specifically about PB Fintech, the stock has gone through a large correction over the last, let us say, about six-eight months or so, but as a concept we do like platform companies,” says Hemang Jani, Independent Market Expert.Firstly, wanted to touch upon PB Fintech, that is one of the stocks that going to be in focus today. As per sources the block deal will be there wherein Yashish Dahiya likely to sell around 5 million shares at a price of Rs 1800. If you can give us some sense that how do you see this particular deal to happen, coming at this time wherein recently such deals were not taken that positively by the markets, case in point being Dixon Tech?Hemang Jani: Yes, clearly, when the market sentiment is so good and when the indices are at all-time high or somewhere there actually, obviously there is going to be a temptation on the part of the promoters and some of the private equity investors to take out some profits off the table. And I do not see necessarily that as a bad thing, only thing is that the short run if the fund raise quantum is on a larger size, it could put some pressure on the liquidity, but not a bad thing per se in the current scenario. Talking specifically about PB Fintech, the stock has gone through a large correction over the last, let us say, about six-eight months or so, but as a concept we do like platform companies.

We do think that going ahead something like PB Fintech or some of the other platform companies are better placed in the current scenario. So, not a short-term view there, but from 12 months or beyond I definitely think that PB Fintech will be one stock that one could definitely have because of the niche offering that they have in insurance and other related products.

Yesterday on the show we were having a very interesting conversation where Nikunj was pointing out how the cement space has underperformed what Nifty has done in the last 10 years. If you take a look at it from a broader perspective, do you believe that cement has what it takes to outperform the Nifty going ahead?Hemang Jani: Cement is extremely well placed because of the underperformance that it had over the last two-three years. Most importantly, if you see at the industry level, there is a massive consolidation and there are two major players who have emerged. If you look at the numbers, I think operating profit per tonne across majority of the companies is looking quite strong and the fact that a crude price has actually come off to whatever they are at right now, surely will have some sort of a positive rub off.

The only thing is that typically in the monsoon period there is a little bit of low activity, so this quarter per se in terms of volume growth may not be great, but from a 6 to 12 months perspective names like UltraTech, some of the southern companies because remember in south India the overall demand-supply situation is better and the pricing environment is much better, so something like Cement, Sagar Cement these are the better ones compared to some of the north or northwest based companies.So, defence stocks may be expensive, but looking at how the lay of the land and global war diplomacy and supremacy is changing, defence has a long way to go.Hemang Jani: I think the way the geopolitics has played out in the last, let us say, one year or so, there is going to be a massive budget that will be thrown at defence be it Eurozone, US of course, Middle East, India, China. So, definitely this theme is going to be very big and remember that while we are all talking about increased budget and all that, the Indian defence budget and the size of the Indian companies is not even $2 or $3 billion. I was looking at the data and some of the companies in Europe or US in terms in terms of their top line is about $40, $50, $60, billion. Theme is playing out very well both globally and in India. So, there are very few companies who have that kind of a product range to offer where there is a large part of which is going to be put out there. So, I definitely think that maybe Bharat Electronics, HAL, some of the private names in the defence are extremely well placed.