Next in line to get re-rated? 6 fertilizer stock ideas with four having buy reco and upside potential of u

If one looks at how the policies have panned in the last nine years. It is clear that one by one every sector has been looked upon and if that sector has been getting government subsidies in any form, the government has tried to improve the delivery mechanism of that subsidy by plugging leakage in a manner that the right person gets the subsidy and the government gets the intended result. In the case of the fertilizer industry, it started with urea getting coated with neem which was not a financial measure but had a financial impact. Similarly, there were some measures which in the short term impacted some fertilizer companies but over a period, there has been a clean up going in the industry. Will the street be having a re-look at them ?

On Interim Budget day when the fertilizer subsidy bill was seen as lower than expected, the street reacted negatively. The assumption is that if the fertilizer subsidy is going to come down then it is bad for the sector. Now there is another way to look at it, a government that has been ensuring that agriculture gets the right amount of attention and doing the various policy pushes, then why is the overall projected subsidy bill down? Probably, it may be because the government is expecting that policy actions that it has taken over the years will yield results and some of the other non-financial efforts that it will take in the sector will help reduce the bill without having an adverse effect on any stakeholders. Is it too early to take a negative view?

With the focus of government policies increasingly turning favourable toward the manufacturing sector, some of the capital goods and engineering companies are making a comeback on the analysts list.

If one looks at how one sector after another has been recovering, engineering which overlaps in some part with capital goods has been one of the last ones to see a recovery in real business sense. It is only in the last few months that one would these companies announce that either they have got orders or any other sort of other contracts. If one looks at the orders or contract wins, a number of them are showing quarter on quarter increase for almost the three quarters. There is a reason why these companies were last on the list to show revival. Only when the user industry which in this case ranges from chemical, and sugar railways to literally everyone else involved in manufacturing and utilities embarks upon a capacity expansion only then these engineering cum capital good companies would get orders and show an improvement. In the first phase of economic recovery, it was more of repairing both balance sheets and policy framework that took place. It is only recently that we have seen companies get confident and a new capex cycle getting started. Probably that is why some of the mid-sized players have been able to outperform even a volatile market.

Ministries either oppose the move or sit tight.

While the recent performance of stocks like REC, PFC and recently listed IRDEA has brought focus back to one segment of power companies. But the fact is that in the last few years, the sector has been going through a consolidation. Some of it was forced by the banks due to many companies going under the IBC and some due to the fact that any industry which has gone through a troubled phase of almost a decade, the players who are able to survive tend to get more attention because they have learnt the art of surviving a tough phase which is one most important feature for long term survival. Power sector stocks are now catching up with what the market has witnessed in the last few years.

While there are many ways to play the theme of industrial recovery, there is a set of companies, who don't come into headlines very often but a very high correlation between how the economy as whole is doing and a sector in particular. So while steel companies may come into news because of what happens to commodity prices and China, but the companies, which supply consumables like refractory material to them, don't come into the headlines. It is not only steel or metal, there are a host of sectors where there are niche players who supply critical input to another industry and their bottomline growth is linked to what is happening in the mother industry. Now there is little doubt that one after another things are turning better for many sectors, so some of these companies which supply industrial consumables are also coming into focus.

Pharma as a sector, both in terms of business and stocks price performance has been under pressure for a very long time. Some time USFDA issues, at other instances of pricing pressure in US markets have been troubling the sector. However, recently some tailwinds have emerged both for the companies focussing on domestic pharma and also the ones focussed on the US generic market. The list is based on upside estimated by the analysts, with the highest potential stock coming on the top of the list.

There are many sectors which have been able to do well because of policy push by the government. Many may not realize that “Tipper” which is a kind of light commercial vehicle ( LCV) did extremely well due to the fact that it is used in road construction and in the last eight years, that has done extremely well. Similarly a tile company did well because there was a housing boom and auto ancillary which was focussed on EV did well due to push to EV. Now with increased probability of continuation of policy push, some of these sectors and companies are likely to see continued tailwinds. ET screener powered by Refinitiv’s Stock Report Plus applies different algorithms & filters to all BSE and NSE stocks, and lists stocks which fulfill the various criteria as specified into the algorithms & filters to find those which might help navigate the stock market.

In the last nine years, it has been government spending which has been at the forefront of capital expenditure. But if one goes by the recent estimates of sanctioned loans by the banks, there are indications that private sector capex which has been at the literally non-existent for quite some time might be coming back. Which sector in the capital good space will gain is a big question because capital goods and engineering is a very broad term. From a company making small machinery parts to one making a large turbine for power generation all tend to get clubbed together. But they are all different, both in their ability to perform complex tasks and the industry they are catering.