Firstpost

Why stable real estate prices are not good news for builders

India-Real-Estate-MarketThe Financial Express reports today that investments into real estate are at a seven year high. As a news-report in the pink paper points out: “Investments into the real estate sector in 2015, at close to $8 billion or Rs 53,000 crore, are poised for a seven-year high. Much of this has come in via the private equity (PE) route and borrowings through non-convertible debentures (NCD).” This is surprising given the bad state that real estate is in. A possible explanation for this is the availability of “easy money” at low interest rates in large parts of the Western world. This money seems to be finding its way into Indian real estate.

All this money coming into the sector has allowed builders to not cut prices in order to get rid of their unsold homes and use the money thus generated to repay their outstanding banking loans. As the news-report points out: “Had the investments not materialised, developers may have been pushed to drop prices to monetise inventory at a time when demand has been waning. Instead, they’re holding on to inventory.”

This is only partly correct and applies only to those builders who have been getting investments from the private equity route as well as been borrowing through the non-convertible debentures route. And that is not a very large number in a country where there are thousands of builders.

Take the case of the upper end of the real estate market in Mumbai, where private equity money has come in. The unsold inventory of homes continues to be high. Data from real estate research firm PropEquity points out that as on September 30, 2015, 6048 luxury apartments priced above Rs 5 crore continued to remain unsold in Mumbai. Of this 3,662 are in the Rs 5 crore and Rs 10 crore range, and the remaining above that.

Further, real estate prices have corrected in large parts of the country. As Getamber Anand, president of Confederation of Real Estate Developers’ Associations of India (CREDAI), a real estate lobby, said a few days back: “Prices have come down by 15-20 per cent in last one and half years and there is no further scope for reduction.” Hence, the assertion that private equity money and borrowings through the non-convertible debentures route has allowed builders not to cut prices is only partly correct.

Further, those companies that have managed to raise money through private equity and non-convertible debentures are only kicking the can down the road. Also, this money is being raised at a very high cost.

In a recent research note titled The realty reality Crisil points out: “The cost of alternative funding has increased over the last two years as pressure on developers financial position intensified. About one-third of the non-convertible debentures issuances last fiscal yielded an internal rate of return of more than 20%, compared with no issuances of similar yields in 2012.”

You don’t need to be an expert in finance to understand that 20% is a very high rate indeed.

The same stands true for private equity firms as well. As Crisil points out: “As for private equity [firms], the higher return expectation will increase the refinancing risk for the realtors over the longer term, unless the demand picks up substantially. CRISIL estimates payout for private equity funds for the sector as a whole at Rs 85,000 crore, assuming a return of 20% over a 5 year period. Hence, alternative funding sources such as non-convertible debentures and private equity [firms] are expected to continue providing some respite in the short term only.”

What does this mean? This means that the real estate companies have essentially managed to postpone their debt problem. Companies have managed to take on new debt and pay off their existing debt to banks. But this new debt also needs to be repaid. And that can only be repaid if companies manage to generate money through sale of homes that they have built. Further, they need to build new homes as well.

This is not going to happen if real estate prices stay stable at their current levels. It will only happen once real estate prices fall from their current levels and buyers start getting interested in purchasing real estate.

Currently, the real estate prices are way too high for buyers to be interested in buying homes. Hence, stable prices are actually not in the best interest of real estate builders. But that is clearly not the way they look at the prevailing situation. As Anand of CREDAI said: “There is no further scope for reduction [in prices].”

(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He tweets @kaul_vivek)

This article originally appeared on Firstpost on December 14, 2015

11 reasons why India growing at 7.4% is simply not believable

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Data released by the ministry of statistics and programme implementation shows that India’s gross domestic product (GDP), a measure of the size of the economy, grew by 7.4% during the period between July to September 2015. These are fantastic numbers in a world where real economic growth is slowing down. Even China is finding it tough to grow at rates that it did in the past.

So what is driving India’s economy? Manufacturing grew by a 9.3%. Trade, hotel, transport, communication & services related to broadcasting grew by 10.6%.

And financial, insurance, real estate and professional services grew by 9.7%. These three segments which formed 62.6% of the total economy between July to September 2014, helped the economy grow by 7.4%. Agricultural, forestry and fishing grew by just 2.2%.

The question is how believable is this growth of 7.4%? The short answer is—not very. It is worth mentioning here that GDP is ultimately a theoretical construct.

Most real economic numbers suggest otherwise.

Let’s take a look at them one by one.

1) Exports have been falling eleven months in a row. In fact, between April and October 2015, exports have fallen by 17.6% to $154.29 billion, in comparison to the same period last year. Between April and October 2014, the exports had stood at $187.29 billion. A greater than 7% economic growth rate with falling exports is a little difficult to believe.

2) Corporate profitability continues to remain subdued. As a recent news-report in the Business Standard points out regarding the profitability for the period July to September 2015: “It was another muted quarter for India Inc, with aggregate profit growth at both the operating and net level growing at only under one per cent over a year-ago period. The sample is of 2,300 companies…The numbers are worse for the benchmark indices such as the Nifty, where operating and net profit are down between three-five per cent over the year-ago quarter, with aggregate numbers below expectations.”

3) Passenger vehicles sales, another good measure of economic recovery, have been subdued through most of this financial year, though there has been some recovery in October 2015, which doesn’t come under the July to September 2015 period, for which the economic growth number has been reported. Between September 2015 and September 2014, passenger vehicles sales went up by only 3.85%.

4) Motorcycle sales, a very good economic indicator in the Indian context, have fallen for most of the financial year, only to have recovered a little in October due to festival season sales. It remains to be seen whether the sales can be sustained for November 2015. Data from the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (Siam) points out that motorcycle sales during the first six months of the year (April to September 2015) were down by 4.06% to 5.36 million units, in comparison to the same period last year.

5) Tractor sales have been falling for thirteen months in a row. Data from the Tractor Manufacturers Association shows that sales have fallen by 20% during the first six months of this financial year (i.e. April to September 2015). This is a clear example of weak agricultural growth.

6) The loan growth of banks continues to remain subdued. The sectoral deployment of credit data released by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) shows that bank loans grew by 8.4% between September 2014 and September 2015. In fact, they grew by an even slower 8.1% between October 2014 and October 2015.

7) Along with this, the bad loans of banks continue to pile up. As a recent report in The Indian Express points out: “Already burdened by bad loans, 37 banks, led by public sector ones, have reported a 26.8 per cent rise in non-performing assets (NPAs) over the 12-month period ending September this year.”
The overall non-performing assets of banks as of September 2015 stood at Rs 3,36,685 crore. This was an increase of Rs 71,000 crore, according to numbers put together by credit rating firm CARE.

8) The number of stalled industrial projects went up during the period July to September 2015. As a recent research note by Morgan Stanley points out: “The stock of stalled projects climbed in the September quarter, while existing capacity is being underutilized. This has, not surprisingly, lowered interest in greenfield investments, with industrial credit loan growth stagnating in single-digits.” The bulk of the stalled projects belong to the manufacturing and infrastructure sectors. Further, there is a good anecdotal evidence to suggest that small and medium enterprises, a major source of job growth, continue to struggle.

9) The Reserve Bank of India governor Raghuram Rajan recently pointed out that factories were running 30% below capacity as of now. A research report by DBS points out that the capacity utilisation rate was at 80% in 2011-2012. This suggests a significant slack in the economy. How is manufacturing then growing by 9%, as suggested by the data released by the ministry of statistics and programme implementation?

10) The real estate sector, a major employer of people, continues to be in the doldrums, with new launches coming down and the number of unsold homes going up.

11) Further, for two years in a row India has had a deficient monsoon. In its end of season report, the India Meteorological Department (IMD), the nation’s weather forecaster, stated that “rainfall over the country as a whole was 86% of its long period average (LPA). Thus years 2014 & 2015 was the fourth case of two consecutive all India deficient monsoon years during the last 115 years.”

IMD uses rainfall data for the last 50 years to come up with the long period average. If the rainfall is between 96% and 104% of the 50 year average, then it is categorised as normal. If it is between 90% and 96% of the 50 year average is categorised as below-normal. And anything below 90% is categorised as deficient.

If something has happened only four times in 115 years, there is clearly reason to worry, given that nearly half of India’s population is dependent on agriculture. Also, this has clearly slowed down consumer demand in much of rural India.

On the positive side a lot has been written on the 36% jump in indirect tax collections. This has been offered as an example of a revival in economic activity.

Nevertheless, much of this huge jump has come from the government increasing the excise duty on petrol and diesel and capturing much of the fall in oil prices. Excise duty collections have jumped by 68.6% during the course of this financial year.

In fact as a recent ministry of finance press release points out: “These collections reflect in part increase due to additional measures taken by the Government from time to time, including the excise increases on diesel and petrol, the increase in clean energy cess, the withdrawal of exemptions for motor vehicles, capital goods and consumer durables, and from June 2015, the increase in Service Tax rates from 12.36% to 14%. However, stripped of all these additional measures, indirect tax collections increased by 11.6% during April-October 2015 as compared to April-October 2014.”

As the Chief Economic Adviser Arvind Subramanian recently said in an interview: “Even if you take away all the new things, new taxes have been added, that number[indirect taxes number] is growing at a robust about 11.5 -12% and if that number is right, that means that the underlined economy is recovering.”

There are few other data points on the positive side. The commercial vehicle sales have been robust during the first six months of the financial year. At the same time consumption of petroleum products has also gone up by 8.5% between April and Septmber 2015.

While the underlying economy might be recovering, it is very difficult to believe that it is growing at 7.4%. In fact, Subramanian and Rajan suggested the same in a very roundabout sort of way in a recent joint interview to a television channel.

To conclude, once you take all the factors I have listed above into account, the economic growth (or GDP growth) number of 7.4%, doesn’t look believable at all.

(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He tweets @kaul_vivek)

(The column was originally published on Firstpost on December 1, 2015)

Point blank: 7th Pay Commission recommendations will hit govt finances hard

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The Seventh Pay Commission has recommended a 23.6% increase in salaries of central government employees, as well as pensions of retired central government employees. This largesse will cost the government Rs 1,02,100 crore in 2016-2017, the report estimates.

The report estimates that this increase will work out to 0.65% of the gross domestic product (GDP) in 2016-2017.  In comparison, the awards of the Sixth Pay Commission had worked out to 0.77% of the GDP.

The report points out that “while projecting the GDP for 2016-17, we assumed that the real growth rate of GDP will be 7.5 percent and inflation will be 4 percent in 2016-17.” This is perhaps a little overoptimistic, but let me not nit-pick.

Also, the 0.65% of the GDP number may be lower than what the number might eventually turn out to be because it does not take into account the impact of recommending one rank one pension for central government employees as well as para-military personnel.

Further, the trouble with expressing amounts as a percentage of the GDP is that it does not always show the correct picture. It is important to understand what will be the impact of the ‘extra’ Rs 1,02,100 crore on government finances.

In 2005-2006, the total government expenditure had stood at Rs 5,06,123 crore. A decade later in 2015-2016, the total government expenditure is projected to be at Rs 17,77,477 crore. This means an increase in expenditure at around 13.4% per year.

In 2005-2006, the total receipts of the government (less its borrowings) or what it earned, stood at Rs 3,59,688 crore. Ten years later in 2015-2016, the total receipts of the government(less its borrowing) is expected to be at Rs 12,21,828 crore. This means an increase in earnings at around 13% per year.

I am calculating these numbers so as to be make a rough projection for the receipts as well as the expenditure of the government in 2016-2017, the next financial year. Looking at the long-term trend we will assumethat for 2016-2017, the receipts of the government will go up by 13%, whereas its expenditure will go up by 13.4%. While the chances of things playing out exactly like this are low, but please indulge me, in order to understand the broader point I am trying to make.

Hence, the government receipts for the year 2016-2017 are likely to be at Rs 13,80,666 crore (1.13 times Rs 12,21,828 crore, the projected receipts for 2015-2016). The government expenditure for the year is likely to be around Rs 20,15,389 crore (1.134 times Rs 17,774,77 crore, the projected expenditure for 2015-2016).

This expenditure for 2016-2017 does not include the Rs 1,02,100 crore cost of the recommendations of the Seventh Pay Commission. We need to add this.

Hence, the total expenditure is likely to be at Rs 21,17,489 crore. Against this, the government will earn Rs 13,80,666 crore as receipts.

This means that the government will run a fiscal deficit of around Rs 7,36,823 crore. Fiscal deficit is the difference between what a government earns and what it spends. In 2015-2016, the fiscal deficit is projected to be around Rs 5,55,649 crore or 3.9% of the GDP. So what will the fiscal deficit work out to be in 2016-2017 as a proportion of the GDP?

For 2015-2016, the nominal GDP(i.e. not adjusted for inflation) is assumed to be at Rs 14,108,945 crore. The Seventh Pay Commission assumed a real GDP growth of 7.5 percent and an inflation of 4 percent in 2016-17. We will stick to the same numbers and hence assume a nominal GDP growth of 11.5% (7.5% real GDP growth plus 4% inflation).

This would mean the nominal GDP in 2016-2017 would be Rs 15,731,474 crore (1.115 times Rs 14,108,945 crore, the GDP projected for 2015-2016). Hence, the fiscal deficit as a proportion of GDP for 2016-2017 would work out at 4.7% (Rs 7,36,823 crore expressed as a proportion of Rs 15,731,474 crore).

This means the Seventh Pay Commission recommendations if accepted, will push up the fiscal deficit to 4.7% of the GDP from this year’s 3.9%. And this isn’t a good thing, given that the government is trying to achieve a fiscal deficit of 3.5% of the GDP by 2016-2017 and 3% of the GDP by 2017-2018.

The broader lesson here is that if things continue in the way they are now the Seventh Pay Commission recommendations are likely to screw up the government finances big time by pushing up the fiscal deficit.

The way to avoid this situation is by increasing receipts or cutting down on expenditure. If salary expenditure goes up, then other productive expenditure like capital expenditure may have to be cut. And that can’t be good news for the economy.

Further, if the government believes in good economics it needs to shut down loss-making public sector enterprises, but that is unlikely to happen.

On the receipt side the option to raise income tax rates is always there. But that will be a very unpopular move. The finance minister Arun Jaitley in his last budget speech had said: “I, therefore, propose to reduce the rate of Corporate Tax from 30% to 25% over the next 4 years.” So if corporate tax rate is likely to be brought down, that doesn’t leave the government with many options in order to increase its receipts. Perhaps, we may see the service tax rate being raised further in the next budget.

We may also see the government resorting to more standalone surcharges and cesses, like it already has in the form of Swacch Bharat cess. The government will also have to fasten the pace of disinvestment, something most governments haven’t shown interest in doing up until now.

Also, this year the government benefitted substantially from lower oil prices. It captured a major part of the gains by raising excise duty and not passing on the gain to consumers. Next year, any incremental help from falling oil prices may not be available.

All in all, the recommendations of the Seventh Pay Commission, if accepted, will not work out well for the government finances, unless it chooses to change the current way of doing things. Further, it is best that the government instead of accepting an increase of 23.6%, settles at a lower number between 12-15%, to control the damage on its finances.

The government as expected remains optimistic. As the finance secretary Ratan Watal put it: “We will handle this.” I really hope it does.

(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He tweets @kaul_vivek)

The column originally appeared on Firstpost.com on Nov 20, 2015

India’s Great Delay: From Son of India to Make in India

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The great filmmaker Mehboob Khan’s last film release was Son of India. The movie released in 1962 and Khan died in 1964.

The movie is now more or less forgotten except for the song: “nanha munna rahi hoon desh ka sipahi hoon”. The song was a regular feature during the propaganda driven days when Doordarshan was the only TV channel in town and Chitrahaar one of the few entertaining shows that one could watch during the course of a week.

The song was shown regularly on Chitrahaar and given that, perhaps a whole generation grew up listening to it. One of the lines in the song is: “naya hai zamana nayi hai dagar, desh ko banaoonga machino ka nagar”. Loosely translated this means that “in this new world we will make India a nation of machines and factories”.

Fifty two years after the 1962 release of Son of India, Narendra Modi was elected as the prime minister of India in May 2014. Modi gave the call of Make in India in August 2014, echoing sentiments of the nanha munna rahi hoon The Make in India website when it was first launched defined it as “a major new national program designed to transform Indiainto a global manufacturing hub.” (I can’t find this line on the website anymore).

The question to ask here is what went wrong during the intervening period between 1962 and 2014? Why are we still talking about aiming to build factories and a vibrant manufacturing sector more than half a century later?

TN Ninan has an answer in his excellent new book The Turn of the Tortoise—The Challenge and Promise of India’s Future. As he writes: “Size helps preserve India as a democracy—it is too big and too complex for any person to so dominate the whole land as to render the law and institutions ineffective, or at least to do so for any length of time.”
Son_of_India_film_poster

While size has helped Indian democracy it has also led to policy errors, which shouldn’t have been made. As Ninan points out: “Successful small countries find it easy, indeed necessary, to focus on export markets because their internal markets are too small to support scale production. But India is big enough to offer the potential of a large domestic market; inevitably, that became the focus of policy.”

The countries of South East Asia also started with import substitution (or producing only for the domestic market) but quickly moved their focus towards exports.

India continued to favour import substitution for much longer and this had its repercussions. “The difference between exporting units and those with a domestic market orientation is that the former have to be competitive, the latter not necessarily so. In India’s case, the inward focus became so pronounced that the country became an economic prison, functioning behind high protective walls. It is therefore evolved into a market for mostly shoddy, usually overpriced goods that would not sell anywhere except countries that were similarly starved of quality goods, such as the Soviet Union, which at one stage was India’s largest trading partner,” writes Ninan.

This put us back in the manufacturing race. And we are still trying to get the manufacturing revolution going. In fact, one of the visions of the Make in India programme is “enhancing the global competitiveness of the Indian manufacturing sector.”

What this tells us is that India is trying to come to the manufacturing party a little too late in the day. Nevertheless, this perhaps remains the only formula for pulling out India’s poor from poverty. And this is only going to happen if the ease of doing business is improved and the inspector raj is done away with, in the days to come.

As Mihir Sharma writes in Restart—The Last Chance for the Indian Economy: “The Indian state is run for its nice, kindly Inspectors, and not for workers or entrepreneurs”. And this needs to be corrected.

The rules and regulations that any manufacturer needs to follow are simply humongous. As Ninan writes: “A policy statement issued in 2011(two full decades after 1991) recognized that the average manufacturing company has to comply with seventy laws, face multiple inspections and file as many as 100 returns in a year. Bear in mind that these returns were being filed (or not filed) by small and medium enterprises that accounted for 45 per cent of manufacturing output and 40 per cent of merchandize exports.”

This is something that the Modi government has improved on after coming to power last year, by introducing self-certification, nonetheless a lot remains to be done on this front.

To conclude, the ball is now in Modi’s court. It took India nearly 70 years to decisively vote for a non-Congress party to power. Modi has the majority to get things done. If he doesn’t, chances are the Congress might be voted back to power. And there can be no bigger tragedy than that.

(Vivek Kaul is the writer of the Easy Money trilogy. He tweets @kaul_vivek)

The column originally appeared on Firstpost on Oct 20, 2015

Why the Bihar poll matters for stock markets: A BJP win will allow stockbrokers to sell ‘ache din’ again

 


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The assembly elections in the state of Bihar are scheduled to happen across five phases between October 12, 2015, and November 7, 2015. The constituents of the stock market are closely following the run up to these elections like they had followed the run up to the Lok Sabha elections last year.

While the stock market following the Lok Sabha elections is but natural, why is it following the run up to the assembly elections in Bihar? Bihar is the poorest state in India as measured by the per capita income. Data released by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation shows that for 2014-2015, the per capita income of the state was Rs 36,143. This was the lowest among the states and union-territories, which had declared their per capita income when the data was published in July earlier this year.

During 2013-2014, the per capita income of the state was at Rs 31,199, the lowest among all states and union-territories. The state of Uttar Pradesh came in second from the bottom at Rs 36,250. This when the per capita income of Bihar has grown at greater than 15% in each of the last three financial year’s.

Data from the India Brand Equity Foundation points out that the per capita income of the state is around 43% of the Indian per capita income. The gross domestic product (GDP) of the state is around 3.25% of the Indian GDP, even though the state has more than 8% of India’s population.

The installed power capacity of the state is 2759.8 MW, which is around 1% of the total capacity in India. Over and above this, given the many years of lawlessness and the lack of electricity that the state has faced, it barely has an industry.

Data from the ministry of finance shows that the state has 26 public private partnership projects. This is less than 2% of the 1409 projects all across India. The India Brand Equity Foundation points out that the “total FDI for Bihar and Jharkhand combined during the period from April 2000 to May 2015 stood at US$ 59 million.” On this my guess is that even this miniscule amount would have gone more to Jharkhand than Bihar.

The state barely contributes to the Indian GDP, has virtually no industry and almost no FDI is going into the state. In this scenario why is the stock market worried about Bihar? As Shankar Sharma, Vice Chairman and Managing Director of First Global recently told Business Standard: “Bihar election is important from the context of whether the Modi government still enjoys popular mandate or not.”

And how will that help the stock market? A win in Bihar for the Bhartiya Janata Party(BJP) led coalition will allow the stock brokers to sell the Narendra Modi “ache din aane waale hain” story all over again to foreign investors as well as Indian investors.

As Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner write in Superforecasting—The Art and Science of Forecasting: “The one undeniable talent that talking heads have is their skill at telling a compelling story with conviction, and that is enough.”

Stock market investors love a good story and Narendra Modi in control is a compelling story that can ‘still’ be sold with some conviction by stock brokers. What works for it is the fact that it has already been sold once between September 2013 and May 2014, in the run up to the last Lok Sabha elections. The BSE Sensex ran up 33% between September 2013 and May 26, 2014, when Narendra Modi was sworn in as the prime minister of the country.

This was purely a sentiment based rally based around a compelling story that was well sold. The stock brokers are hoping to repeat this in the time to come. The trouble is that unlike the last Lok Sabha election this election remains too close to call. Hence, up until now, various opinion polls have swung both ways. Some have suggested that the BJP led alliance will win, whereas others have suggested that Lalu Prasad Yadav + Nitish Kumar + Congress (or the Grand Alliance) will win. Let’s see which way things swing.

(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He tweets @kaul_vivek)

The column originally appeared on Firstpost on Oct 6, 2015