EXECUTIVE SUMMARY. The prestigious Institutional Investor 2019 All-Asia ex-Japan Executive Team Awards have been announced. Remarkably, sell-side analysts selected Jairam Sridharan (Axis Bank) as the ‘Best CFO ’ in the banking category. This should be deeply troubling to the capital market. In effect, these highly experienced analysts are loudly...
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY. The credit rating agency, ICRA (an affiliate of Moody’s) has finally sacked Naresh Takkar, its chief executive officer (CEO). This appears to be a belated response to pressure from the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), the capital markets regulator. Earlier, following an anonymous complaint to SEBI, reportedly...
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY. R.C. Bhargava is the long-serving current chairman of Maruti Suzuki India, India’s largest automobile company. He was also an independent director of IL&FS, the failed infrastructure developer and non-bank finance company, from 1990 till 2018. At that point, the Indian government finally removed all the directors of...
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY. The sharp slowdown in the Indian economy and the wide publicity to the production cutbacks and layoffs in the automobile sector have cast the spotlight on the retail sector of banking. The business model of HDFC Bank, India’s largest bank by market capitalization, is firmly wrapped around...
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY. HDFC Bank’s low-cost liabilities strategy of focusing on huge numbers of new client acquisitions in the semi-urban and rural centres may be getting large numbers of new customers, but is not resulting in significant growth in current and savings account deposits (CASA). The pressure on CASA appears...
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY. The market has not been kind to Axis Bank after its 1QFY2020 results. The share price has fallen 7%, as compared with a fall in the NIFTY of only 2%. While analysts have raised concerns on the elevated credit costs and high slippages to gross non-performing assets,...
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY.
Problem: You are a leading
sell-side analyst. What do you do when confronted with valuable, authoritative,
and hitherto confidential information about India’s leading banks?
A. Highlight it.
B. Analyse it and publish a research report on it.
C. Pretend it doesn’t exist.
The correct answer, of
course, is C. Pink...
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY. Recently, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) was forced to disclose its confidential inspection reports, called Risk Assessment Reports (RARs), of the State Bank of India (SBI), HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank and Axis Bank for the years FY2013 to FY2015. Shockingly, among the four banks, HDFC Bank...
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY. Under the threat of being pulled up for contempt of court by the Supreme Court of India, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) finally disclosed the confidential inspection reports, called Risk Assessment Reports, of some banks requested under the Right to Information Act (RTI), 2005. The reports,...
The appalling record of incompetence, and likely worse, by India’s credit rating agencies (CRAs) continues to lengthen. The latest instance is the double default of commercial debt obligations (on June 27 and July 1, 2019) by Cox and Kings, a tour and travels services company. In this case the...
