Vivek Kaul
The minority shareholders of Maruti Suzuki are not a happy lot these days.
They are protesting against the decision of Maruti Suzuki’s parent company Suzuki, to establish a car plant in Gujarat, under its wholly owned Indian subsidiary, Suzuki Gujarat. The cars produced by Suzuki Gujarat will be sold to Maruti Suzuki.
This has not gone down well with the minority investors. The Business Standard reports that seven mutual funds (HDFC MF, Reliance MF, UTI MF, DSP BlackRock MF, SBI MF, Axix MF and ICICI Prudential MF) have written to the company against this proposal of setting up a new car plant in Gujarat under the aegis of Suzuki Gujarat. The Life Insurance Corporation(LIC) of India, the big daddy of Indian stock markets, has also sought details on this from Maruti Suzuki.
There are various questions that are being raised on this decision. Analysts point out that that Maruti Suzuki currently has around Rs 7,000 crores of cash. Why is this cash not being utilized to make cars, rather than just buy them from a subsidiary and then sell them? Also, the depreciation benefits on setting up a new plant would help the company bring down its effective rate of tax, the analysts point out. In short, it makes immense sense for the company to set up a new car plant, instead of buying cars from a subsidiary of its parent company.
The analysts further point out that with this move, Maruti Suzuki might be in considerable danger of being regarded just as a trading company, which buys cars and then sells them, rather than a manufacturing company. If this were to happen, the stock would be de-rated. As a fund manager told the Business Standard “Trading concerns (companies) trade at significantly lower PEs [price to earning ratios] than manufacturing ones.”
News reports suggest that the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) is looking into the issue, given that it is a related party transaction. Suzuki owns 56.21% of Maruti Suzuki and it owns 100% of Suzuki Gujarat. The Companies Act 2013, defines a material related party transaction as one which in aggregate exceeds the higher of 5% of the annual turnover of a company or 20% of its networth. A report in the Mint suggests that Maruti Suzuki will take approval from its minority shareholders on this.
Prima facie it seems correct that the minority shareholders are protesting. But the question is where are they when the government of India is ripping the public sector units? Take the case of Coal India, which on January 14, 2014, declared an interim dividend of Rs 29 per share. The government owns 90% of the company and as a result got a total dividend of Rs 16,485.71 crore.
The government also earned a dividend distribution tax of Rs 3,113.05 crore, thus netting a total of Rs 19,598.76 crore.
This dividend was essentially declared to help the government meet its fiscal deficit target. Fiscal deficit is the difference between what a government earns and what it spends. The money handed over to the government of India could have been used to produce more coal and thus help India become self sufficient when it came to the consumption of coal.
ICICI Prudential MF is one of the seven mutual funds which have written to Maruti Suzuki Ltd. Data from www.valueresearchonline.com shows that as on January 31, 2014, the mutual fund owned Rs 72.91 crore worth of Coal India shares through the ICICI Prudential Dynamic Fund. Why was there not a whiff of protest from ICICI Prudential MF, when the government decided to rip off Coal India? Like it owns shares in Maruti Suzuki, it also owns shares in Coal India. The same was the case with LIC, which owned 1.83% of Coal India’s shares as on December 31, 2013.
Or take the case of ONGC being forced to pick up 5% stake in the Indian Oil Corporation from the government of India. This is expected to cost ONGC around Rs 2,500 crore. This is nothing but a move by the government to strip the company of the cash it has on its books.
Data from www.valueresearchonline.com shows that HDFC Mutual Fund, as on January 31, 2014, owned shares of ONGC worth Rs 207.23 crore, through HDFC Top 200 fund. It also owned shares worth Rs 165.08 crore through HDFC Equity Fund. Why did HDFC MF not protest when the government was busy ripping off ONGC? LIC decided to keep quiet in this case as well. As on December 31, 2013, the insurance major held 7.82% of the total number of shares of the company. No mutual fund has protested against the government forcing public sector banks to pay interim dividends. As has been noted here on FirstBiz, the public sector banks are not in great shape. . As the latest RBI Financial Stability Report points out“Among the bank-groups, the public sector banks continue to have distinctly higher stressed advances at 12.3 per cent of total advances, of which restructured standard advances were around 7.4 percent.”
The stressed asset ratio is the sum of gross non performing assets plus restructured loans divided by the total assets held by the banks. In this scenario where the stressed assets of public sector banks are on the higher side, it makes sense that these banks not be forced to declare interim dividends. The money thus saved should be used to shore up their capital.
Given these reasons, the protest of mutual funds and LIC against Maruti Suzuki, basically stinks of hypocrisy.
The article originally appeared on www.FirstBiz.com on March 5, 2014
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)
FirstBiz
If Chidu’s growth prediction has to be met India will have to grow by 8% this quarter
Vivek Kaul
Economist Bibek Debroy in a recent column in The Economic Times wrote about a perhaps apocryphal story about John Maynard Keynes, the greatest economist of the twentieth century. Keynes it seems was once asked “How is your wife?”. “Compared to whose wife?” Keynes questioned back (on a totally unrelated note Keynes was married to a Russian ballerina named Lydia Lopokova).
The point Keynes was perhaps trying to make is that comparisons are always relative.
The finance minister P Chidambaram has been following this for a while now. He has been comparing the Indian economic scenario with the Western countries, and trying to tell us that we’re not in as bad a scenario as is being made out to be.
In interim budget speech Chidambaram said “World economic growth was 3.9 percent in 2011, 3.1 percent in 2012 and 3.0 percent in 2013. Those numbers tell the story. Among India’s major trading partners, who are also the major sources of our foreign capital inflows, the United States has just recovered from a long recession; Japan’s economy is responding to the stimulus; the Eurozone, as a whole, is reporting a growth of 0.2 percent; and China’s growth has slowed from 9.3 percent in 2011 to 7.7 percent in 2013…The challenges that we face are common to all emerging economies. 2012 and 2013 were years of turbulence. Only a handful of countries were able to keep their head above the water, and among them was India.”
So, if we compare India to the other countries, we are not in as bad a situation as is being made out to be. Or so Chidambaram has tried to tell us over and over again. In fact, in July 2013, he had said that “People should remember India continues to be the second fastest growing economy after China. Even China’s growth which was at 10% has come down to 7% now, while our growth has slid to 5% from 9%…Economic slowdown is there in all the countries. When there is slow growth rate in the world, India cannot remain unaffected.”
Now compare this with what he said in January, 2014. “India remains one of the fast growing large economies of the world,” Chidambaram said on January 15, 2014.
From being the second fastest growing economy in the world in July 2013, India had become one of the fast growing large economies in the world, as per Chidambaram. What happened during this period? What is Chidambaram not telling us?
As Mythili Bhusnurmath wrote in a recent column in the The Economic Times “Because we’re not even among the top five or 10! A look at recent World Bank data on GDP growth in 2013 shows we’ve been overtaken not just by China but by a host of countries: Cambodia (7.3%), Philippines (6.9%), Indonesia (6.2%), Myanmar (6.8%), Vietnam (5.1), Sri Lanka (7.0%) and, hold your breath, Bangladesh (5.8).”
The thing with comparisons is that one can choose who one is compared with, and make oneself look better. And that is what Chidambaram has been doing all this while. When Indian economic growth is compared with countries in the emerging markets, the ‘real’ picture comes out. Our economic growth (as measured through GDP growth) is slower than that of even Bangladesh.
Over and above this, when comparisons of these kind are made, the “base effect” also comes into play. As per World Bank Data the gross domestic product of the United States in 2012 was around $16.2 trillion dollars. If the US economy grows by 2% it adds around $324.9 billion of output to the economy.
The size of the Indian economy(i.e. Its GDP) in 2012 as per the World Bank data was $1.82 trillion. So, if the Indian economy has to grow by $324.9 billion in a year, it will have to grow at close to 17.6% or nearly nine times the pace at which the US economy grew. Hence, a 2% growth in the US goes a much longer way than even a 10% growth in India, because the growth is on a higher base. Also, this growth is to be shared among fewer people in comparison to India, and hence, has a greater impact.
Lets try and understand this through real numbers. During 2013, the US economy grew by 2.5%. At the end of 2012, the GDP of the US economy was $16.2 trillion, as mentioned earlier. A growth of 2.5% means that around $406 billion of output was added to the economy. This added output is to be shared among 32 crore Americans.
Now lets to the same exercise for India. During the period 2013, the Indian economy grew by around 4.7%. In 2012, the GDP of the Indian economy was at $1.82 trillion. This means an output of around $86.5 billion was added to the economy. This added output is to be shared among more than 120 crore Indians.
Hence, the US is much better of at 2.5% growth than India is at 4.7%.
Also, the United States, most countries in the Euro Zone and Japan are developed countries. Hence, even if they grow at low rates, it does not matter beyond a point. That is not the case with India, which continues to be a very poor country, and the only way for it to come out of this rut is faster economic growth.
India’s economic growth, as measured by the growth of the GDP, for the period between October and December 2013 came in at 4.7%. In fact, the fastest growing industry was financing, insurance, real estate and business services, which grew by 12.5%, in comparison to the same period in 2012.
This industry had grown by 10% in the three month period between July and September 2013. And it had grown by 8.9% during April and June 2013.
So how did this growth suddenly jump to 12.5%? An editorial in The Financial Express has an explanation. “Had it not been for the $34 billion the RBI managed to get by way of FCNR[Foreign Currency Non-Repatriable] deposits in the last quarter of 2013—the result of it agreeing to share the cost of currency hedging with investors—the growth would have been dramatically lower than even the 4.7% headline number. The bulk of growth in Q3 came from a bump in the financing/insurance sub-sector where the major change was really the FCNR deposits growth… Since this segment’s growth rose from 10% in Q2 to 12.5% in Q3, this alone resulted in a higher growth of 0.48 percentage points. In which case, it is a safe bet to assume Q3 GDP growth was around 4.3-4.4% without the one-time RBI bump.” Hence, if the FCNR deposits hadn’t suddenly shot up, the growth would have been lower than 4.7%.
In the first quarter of the 2013-2014(i.e. the period between April 1 and June 30, 2013) came in at 4.4%. In the second quarter (i.e. the period between July 1 and September 30, 2013) it came in at 4.8%. So what this means is that we are set of another year in which the economic growth will be less than 5%.
Chidambaram had said in February that there are signs of upturn in the economy and the economic growth for the year 2013-2014 (the period between April 1, 2013 and March 31, 2014) will be at 5.5%. A back of the envelope calculation shows that the economy will have to grow by 8.1% in January to March 2014, for the Indian economy to have grown by 5.5% during 2013-2014. And that is not going to happen. Economic growth for the period 2013-2014 will be less than 5% and that is a safe prediction to make. This is the first time since the mid 1980s that India will grow at less than 5% for two consecutive years.
Of course, Chidambaram is not telling us that.
The article originally appeared on www.FirstBiz.com on March 4, 2014
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)
GDP growth at 4.7%: Is P Chidambaram the new Yo Yo Honey Singh?
Vivek Kaul
Yo Yo Honey Singh has an amazing sense of rhythm.
And every time he comes up with a new song, it keeps playing in my head over and over again, like an infinite loop. His latest song “char botal vodka kaam mera roz ka” is no exception to the rule.
Having said that, one has to also state up front that the lyrics of his songs should never be taken seriously and need to be treated with a pinch of salt. As the tagline of the old Hero Honda advertisement used to be “fill it, shut it, forget it”.
Yo Yo Honey Singh is a tad like that.
But what about the finance minister P Chidambaram? How seriously should he be taken on what he says? Or is he the new Yo Yo Honey Singh? In a recent interview to ET now, after presenting the interim budget, Chidambaram said “There is no doubt that growth is reviving. We clocked 4.4% in Q1 of the current year, 4.8% in Q2, 5.2% at the minimum in Q3 and Q4 taken together. It shows that growth is coming back at the rate of about 0.4% per quarter.”
What Chidambaram was essentially saying is that the economic growth as measured by the growth in gross domestic product(GDP), in the first quarter of the 2013-2014(i.e. the period between April 1 and June 30, 2013) came in at 4.4%. In the second quarter (i.e. the period between July 1 and September 30, 2013) it came in at 4.8%. He further said that the growth during the next two quarters of the year (i.e. the period between October and December 2013 and January and March 2014) would come in at 5.2%, when taken together. And hence, this shows an economic growth rate of 0.4% per quarter, he remarked. So, by that logic it would take around eight quarters or two years more, more for the economic growth to get back to 8%. Now only if things were as simple as that and everything in life moved in an arithmetic progression.
One needs to be rather ‘brave’ to make predictions on the basis of two data points. But that is what Chidambaram did. And now he has been proven wrong with the GDP growth numbers for the third quarter of 2013-2014(i.e. the period between October 1 and December 31, 2013) that were released on February 28, 2014.
During the period, the economic growth as measured by the GDP growth came in at 4.7%. This is nowhere near the 5.2% growth that Chidambaram had predicted around two weeks back. If one looks at the data in detail there are many worrying signs.
The manufacturing sector shrunk by 1.9% during the period (GDP at factor cost. At 2004-2005 prices). It had grown by 2.5% during September to December 2012. The sector had grown by 1% during July to September 2013. If India has to create jobs and move people from farms, the manufacturing sector needs to do well.
The agriculture sector grew by 3.6% during the period, after growing by 4.6% during July to September 2013. The agriculture sector contributed around 16.9% to the GDP ( GDP at factor cost. At 2004-2005 prices). But it employs around 45% of the Indian working population (Employment and Unemployment Survey 2011-12(68th round)). Given this, it is fairly straight forward that if India has to progress jobs need to be created, so that more people can moved out of agriculture, which currently suffers from over-employment.
And what for that to happen, the manufacturing sector needs to do well. In fact, the GDP data clearly shows that the manufacturing sector has barely grown over the last two years.
Other than the manufacturing sector, the mining sector has shrunk by 1.6% during the period. The construction sector, another sector which has the potential to generate ‘huge’ jobs, grew by only 0.6%, after growing by 1%, during September to December 2012. Financing, insurance, real estate and business services did reasonably well and grew by 12.5%, and thus pushed up the overall economic growth by 4.7%.
In fact, things are worrying even when looks at the GDP from the expenditure point of view. The personal final consumption expenditure formed 61.5% of the total expenditure during the period. In September to December 2012, the PFCE had formed around 62.7% of the total expenditure. What this clearly tells us is that PFCE is not rising as fast as other expenditure. In fact, during the period, the PFCE rose by just 2.6% to Rs 9,81,463 crore in comparison to September to December 2012.
Interestingly, during the period September to December 2012, the PFCE had grown by 5.1%. What this clearly tells us is that people are going slow on personal expenditure. The reason for that is high inflation which has led to more and more money being spent on meeting daily expenditure. Hence, people are postponing all other expenditure and that has had an impact on economic growth. One man’s expenditure is another man’s income, after all.
This scenario has been playing out pretty much over the last few years. But P Chidambaram has continued to be optimistic.
In November 2013, he remarked “The second quarter GDP growth rate indicates that the economy may be recovering and is on a growth trajectory again.” In December 2013, he remarked “We are going through a period of stress, but there is ground for optimism. We expect things to become better.” In late December 2013, he remarked “I am confident that the greenshoots that are visible here and there will multiply and that the economy will revive, there will be an upturn in the second half of this year.” In January 2014, he remarked “ I am confident that Indian economy will also get back step by step to the high growth path in three years.” And in February 2014, after presenting the interim budget, he said “we will get back to the high growth path.”
At almost every given opportunity Chidambaram has told us that the economy is recovering, there are green shoots and that the second half of the year will be better than the first half. The GDP grew by 4.4% during April to June 2013 and by 4.8% during July to September 2013. And it grew by 4.7% during October to December 2013. So where is the economic recovery that Chidambaram has been talking about? And where are the green shoots? To me, it appears to be more of the same happening.
Chidambaram has also predicted that “India is likely to achieve an economic growth of between 5-5.5 percent in this fiscal year.” But with the GDP growth being less than 5% during the first three quarters of the year, achieving even 5% growth will be difficult. Let’s not even talk about achieving 5.5% growth.
To conclude, Chidambaram’s statements on economic growth, like the lyrics of Yo Yo Honey Singh’s songs should not be taken seriously at all and be taken with a pinch of salt. While one doesn’t expect a minister of the ruling coalition to be totally negative on the economy, but at least some honesty on what is happening on the economic front, would be nice. Now only, if Chidambaram was listening.
Or, is he, like me, and a lot of other people, busy listening to Yo Yo Honey Singh?
Char botal vodka, kaam mera roz ka…
The article originally appeared on www.FirstBiz.com on March 1, 2014
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)
How Sahara hoodwinked Sebi, RBI and the Supreme Court
Vivek Kaul
The Rs 24,000 crore question for the Sahara group is where did it get the money from to repay the investors who had invested in its housing bonds or the optionally fully convertible debentures(OFCDs)? The group had raised this money through Sahara India Real Estate Corporation Limited (SIRECL) and Sahara Housing Investment Corporation Limited (SHICL).
This happened after the Reserve Bank of India(RBI) ordered the group to shut-down its para-banking operations through which it used to raise money to fund its capital intensive businesses from real estate to an airline.
To get around the RBI directive, the Sahara group started issuing housing bonds through SIRECL and SHICL. These bonds were technically referred to as OFCDs. The Sahara group noted that these bonds were being issued to “friends, associates, group companies, workers/ employees and other individuals associated/affiliated or connected in any manner with Sahara India Group of Companies.”
On this pretext, the group felt that issuance of these OFCDs did not amount to a public issue. As per Section 67 of the Companies Act, 1956, an offer of shares or debentures made to 50 persons or more is construed to be a public offer. It is estimated that the Sahara group sold the housing bonds or OFCDs to around 2.96 crore investors and raised over Rs 24,000 crore.
Hence, the issuance of OFCDs was a public issue and given that it needed to be listed on a stock exchange, which it wasn’t. The Securities and Exchange Board of India(Sebi) came calling and KM Abraham, who was a whole-time member of Sebi, issued an order dated June 23, 2011, in which he asked Sahara to “refund the money collected by the aforesaid companies[i.e. SIRECL and SHCL]…to the subscribers of such Optionally Fully Convertible Debentures with interest of 15% per annum from the date of receipt of money till the date of such repayment.”
In the order Abraham also contested how could Sahara raise such a huge amount of money only through members associated with the Sahara group. “The case of the two Companies is that they have issued OFCDs only to members associated with the Sahara group…Even the listed company with the biggest market capitalisation and the largest investor base in India has only under 4 million investors. In fact, the total investor base in India currently (reckoned on the basis of unique depository accounts in the two Depositories taken together) is only of the order of 15 million,” wrote Abraham. Given this, how did Sahara manage to issue bonds to 2.96 crore investors, who were largely members associated with the group?
This Sebi order was challenged in court by Sahara. It led to a series of events, which finally led to the Supreme Court judgement on August 31, 2012. The apex court in the country basically stood by Sebi’s decision and asked Sahara to refund Rs 24,029 crore that it had raised through OFCDs, to the investors by November 2012.
The Supreme Court directed the Sahara group to hand over money to Sebi, which would in turn refund the money to the investors. The group was soon given more time to repay the money, and further directed to deposit Rs 5,120 crore immediately. This the group paid up on December 5, 2012 and hasn’t paid up anything since then.
It has since contested that it has already paid its investors and handing over the money to Sebi would mean double payment. The group claims that it refunded Rs 16,177 crore to investors in May and June 2012. In fact, the Business Standard had reported in November 2012 that the agents of the Sahara Group were being pushed to collect sehmat patras (consent letters) from investors to show that their money had already been returned to them. “Agents, estimated to be a million strong, who sold OFCDs, often termed housing bonds, have been ordered to collect these letters, failing which their commissions are being stopped. With these consent letters, many of which are pre-dated, with dates ranging from as early as April to show that refunds were spread over a long period, documents such as account statements and passbooks in the hands of the customers are being collected,” the newspaper reported. This happened after the Supreme Court judgement asking Sahara to hand over Rs 24,000 crore to Sebi. If the group was refunding the investors as early as April 2012, why was it fighting a case in the Supreme Court at the same time?
Further, where did the group get the money from? Rs 24,000 crore is clearly not small change. Interestingly, the group has offered an explanation for this.
The group claims that the Sahara India Cooperative Credit Society and Sahara Q Shop bought the real estate assets worth thousands of crores from SIRECL and SHICL, the companies which had issued the OFCDs. This money was then used to repay the investors who had invested in the OFCDs.
But where did Sahara India Cooperative Credit Society and Sahara Q Shop get the money to buy the real estate assets of SIRECL and SHICL? The group claims to have raised this money through the Sahara India partnership firm which raised money on behalf of Sahara India Cooperative Credit Society and Sahara Q Shop, across 4,700 locations throughout the country. The group essentially put its vast network of branches to work, it claims.
The next question is that what was the pretext on which Sahara India Cooperative Credit Society and Sahara Q Shop raised money? Sahara Q Shop could have raised money as an advance against the promise of providing consumer goods to investors who invested in it. The Sahara Q Shop had got immense credibility in small town India, given that it was being advertised by the Indian cricket team.
On the face of it Q Shop seems like a money raising scheme that is being marketed as a retail venture. In fact, in an affidavit filed with the Allahabad High Court, Sebi has alleged that the group was “forcibly and unilaterally converting the investments in Sahara India Real Estate and Sahara Housing Invest to Sahara Q Shop without any consent of the investor, in defiance of the orders of the Supreme Court.”
Also, the question is why shouldn’t the Sahara Q Shop venture qualify as a collective investment scheme. A collective investment scheme is defined as “Any scheme or arrangement made or offered by any company under which the contributions, or payments made by the investors, are pooled and utilised with a view to receive profits, income, produce or property, and is managed on behalf of the investors is a CIS(collective investment scheme). Investors do not have day to day control over the management and operation of such scheme or arrangement.” And this should bring the Sahara Q Shop under the regulatory ambit of Sebi.
Interestingly, the Sahara Q Shop seems to have also invested in the troubled National Spot Exchange. As the Business Standard reports “Recent data put out by the troubled National Spot Exchange (NSEL) showed that Sahara Q Shop had invested a little over Rs 220 crore through Indian Bullion Markets Association, a subsidiary of NSEL.”
What all this tells us is that Sahara continues to be a para-banking operation on the ground.
The article originally appeared on www.FirstBiz.com on February 27, 2014
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)
Fasten your seatbelts: Not only United Bank, a major part of banking is in trouble
Vivek Kaul
In an editorial today (i.e. February 26, 2014), on the troubled United Bank of India, The Financial Express asks “Wasn’t anybody watching?”. “It is amazing that things could have been allowed to come to such a pass without action being taken to stop it,” the pink-paper points out.
In fact, The Financial Express should have been asking this question about the Indian banking sector as a whole, and not just the United Bank in particular. As of September 30, 2013, the stressed asset ratio of the Indian banking system as a whole stood at 10.2% of its total assets.
This is the highest since the financial year 2003-2004 (i.e. the period between April 1, 2003 and March 31, 2004) point out Tushar Poddar and Vishal Vaibhaw of Goldman Sachs in a recent report titled India: No ‘banking’ on growth.
Interestingly, the public sector banks are in a worse situation that their private sector counterparts. As the latest RBI Financial Stability Report points out “Among the bank-groups, the public sector banks continue to have distinctly higher stressed advances at 12.3 per cent of total advances, of which restructured standard advances were around 7.4 per cent.”
The stressed asset ratio is the sum of gross non performing assets plus restructured loans divided by the total assets held by the Indian banking system. What this means in simple English is that for every Rs 100 given by Indian banks as a loan(a loan is an asset for a bank) nearly Rs 10.2 is in shaky territory. The borrower has either stopped to repay this loan or the loan has been restructured, where the borrower has been allowed easier terms to repay the loan (which also entails some loss for the bank) by increasing the tenure of the loan or lowering the interest rate.
The restructuring of a loan happens through the Corporate Debt Restructuring(CDR) cell. The Goldman Sachs analysts point out in their report that 85% of restructured loans were restructured during the last two years (i.e. financial year 2011-2012 and 2012-2013).
What makes the situation even more precarious is the fact that the stressed loans could keep increasing. Goldman Sachs projects that among the banks its research team covers stressed loans could go up by as much as 25% in 2013-2014 (i.e. the period between April 1, 2013 and March 31, 2014). Also, some of the troubled loans have still not been restructured or classified as bad loans by banks. Hence, the situation is worse than what the numbers tell us.
As Akash Prakash of Amansa Capital wrote in a recent column in the Business Standard “Most investors believe that many of the problem assets are yet to be recognised by the system. These banks continue to increase their exposure to the problem areas of power and infrastructure.”
Five sectors, namely, Infrastructure, Iron & Steel, Textiles, Aviation and Mining, have the highest level of stressed advances. “At system level, these five sectors together contribute around 24 percent of total advances of SCBs [scheduled commercial banks], and account for around 51 per cent of their total stressed advances…The share of above mentioned five sectors in the loans portfolio of Public Sector Banks,” the RBI Financial Stability Report points out. Hence, the public sector banks are in greater trouble than their private counterparts.
Of the five sectors the infrastructure sector has contributed around 30% of the total stressed assets even though its share of total loans is only about 15%.
The banks have also not been provisioning enough money against stressed loans. “Moreover, provisions for stressed assets are still low, and the lowest in the region. For public-sector banks under its coverage, our Financials Research team assesses the provision coverage ratio for stressed loans at only 24%,” write Poddar and Vaibhav.
What this means is that the banks are not setting aside enough money to deal with prospect of a greater amount of their stressed loans being defaulted on by borrowers and turning into bad loans. And to that extent, banks have been over-declaring profits. That wouldn’t have been the case if they had not been under-provisioning.
Despite the under-provisioning the capital adequacy ratio of banks has fallen dramatically in the recent past. “The Capital to Risk Weighted Assets Ratio (CRAR) at system level declined to 12.7 per cent as at end September 2013 from 13.8 per cent in as at end March 2013…At bank-group level, PSBs recorded the lowest CRAR at 11.2 per cent,” the RBI Financial Stability Report points out. In fact, since September 30, the capital adequacy ratio of the entire banking system would have fallen even more, given that bad loans have gone up. The capital adequacy ratio of a bank is the total capital of the bank divided by its risk weighted assets.
In the days to come, the banks, particularly public sector banks (given their falling capital adequacy ratio), will have to raise more capital to have a greater buffer against the mounting bad loans. The RBI estimated in late 2012 that banks need to raise around $26-28 billion (or around Rs 1,61,200 crore – Rs 1,73, 600 crore, if one dollar equals Rs 62) by 2018.
This is a huge amount. “The capital raising requirement could increase to US$43bn [Rs 2,66,600 crore] under a stress scenario where gross NPLs[non performing loans] and restructured assets rise to 15% of loans, the previous historical high,” estimates Goldman Sachs.
So where is this money going to come from? For the financial year 2014-2015 (i.e. the period between April 1, 2014 and March 31, 2015). the finance minister P Chidambaram has set aside only Rs 11,200 crore for capital infusion into public sector banks. This is simply not enough.
So should government pump in more money into the banks? It simply doesn’t have the capacity to do so. As Akash Prakash writes “There is no way the government can fund this; there is simply no fiscal capacity. Nor do investors want to stand in front of this freight train, since the capital needs for most banks are greater than their current market capitalisation.”
Let’s take the case of the United Bank of India. The current market capitalisation of the bank is around Rs 1442 crore(assuming a share price of Rs 26). The government has decided to pump in Rs 800 crore into the bank. Given that, the market capitalisation of the bank is around Rs 1442 crore, which private investor would have been ready to pump in Rs 800 crore? Also, when the State Bank of India tried to sell shares worth Rs 9,600 crore to institutional investors recently, it failed to raise the targeted amount and had to be rescued with the Life Insurance Corporation pitching in and picking up its shares.
If the biggest public sector bank in the country, which accounts for nearly 20% of Indian banking, is unable to sell its shares completely, what is the chance for other public sector banks being able to do so?
Given these reasons, Indian banking is in for a tough time ahead. Fasten your seatbelts.
The article originally appeared on www.FirstBiz.com on February 26, 2014.
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)