Nifty gains for 3rd day; Trump views drag pharma, Infosys soars
The market has ended on a strong note fuelled by big gains in IT and power stocks. The Sensex ended up 106.75 points or 0.4 percent at 27247.16 and the Nifty was up 26.55 points or 0.3 percent at 8407.20. About 1201 shares have advanced, 1560 shares declined, and 343 shares are unchanged.Analysts are hoping that December quarter earnings will be healthy for the market. Abhay Laijawala of Deutsche Bank says based on a bottom-up aggregate of estimates, the Sensex is likely to post earnings growth of 15.4 percent YoY in the December 2016 quarter.
However, a significant chunk of earnings growth is attributable to commodity sectors and an exceptional loss in the base of ONGC, he adds. Within the Sensex, he expects sectors like energy, capital goods, telecom, pharma and utilities to post strong growth, while sectors like autos, banks and consumer to report negative earnings growth.’
Meanwhile global investors were disappointed as US President Elect Donald Trump, who takes office on January 20, did not elaborate on his planned growth policies, and instead took aim at targets that included pharmaceutical companies and US intelligence agencies.
Shares of pharma companies were under pressure following Trump’s comments on drug pricing and foreign manufacturing. Trump said that the US will create new drug-bidding procedure. Shares of Sun Pharma , Dr Reddy’s Labs and Cadila were down as major Indian pharma companies earn around 15-50 percent revenue from the US market.
Donald Trump on Wednesday said pharmaceutical companies are “getting away with murder” in what they charge the government for medicines, and promised that would change, sending drugs stocks sharply lower.
Infosys was up over 3 percent ahead of December quarter. The IT services exporter’s third quarter earnings are expected to be subdued due to seasonal weakness and RBS’s contract cancellation. All eyes are on its full year guidance that had been changed twice from the start of current financial year. Profit is seen falling 1 percent quarter-on-quarter to Rs 3,569 crore and dollar revenue is also likely to slip 1 percent to USD 2,560 million in the quarter ended December 2016, according to average of estimates of analysts polled by CNBC-TV18.
Revenue in rupee terms during the quarter is expected to be flat Rs 17,313 crore against Rs 17,310 crore in previous quarter. Analysts will closely watch Infosys’ full year revenue guidance as its revenue growth momentum has been lost when it saw the contract cancellation at RBS (that contributed 1.4 percent of revenue).
Tata Consultancy Services, the country’s largest IT services provider, on Thursday said its third quarter (October-December) profit increased 2.9 percent sequentially to Rs 6,778 crore, driven by the strong digital business and great execution work. It touched USD 1 billion mark in profit for the first time.
Revenue during the quarter increased 1.5 percent to Rs 29,735 crore and dollar revenue growth was 0.3 percent at Rs 4,387 crore compared with previous quarter. Constant currency revenue growth for the quarter was at 2 percent with volume growth of 1 percent on sequential basis.
NTPC, Infosys, L&T, Cipla and Wipro were top gainers while Lupin, HUL, Coal India, Dr Reddy’s Labs and ITC were losers in the Sensex.
