&w=3840&q=100)
Top stock picks by Motilal Oswal: Large, mid & small cap recommendations
Stock picks by Motilal Oswal
Large Cap
M&M – Target: ₹3,482
M&M reported a better-than-expected performance in Q4, led by a strong margin beat in FES segment (at 19.4 per cent against 17.3 per cent estimate). Revenue grew 24.5 per cent year-on-year (Y-o-Y), and Earnings before interset, tax, depreciation and amortisation (Ebitda) margin expanded 180 basis points (bp) Y-o-Y to 14.9 per cent, driven by improved ASPs across both the Auto and FES segments.
Management remains confident of outperforming the UV industry in FY26, driven by new launches like Thar Roxx, XUV 3XO, and recent EVs. It plans to boost UV capacity to 69,000/85,000 units in FY26/FY27, with a greenfield project for future requirements beyond FY28. We believe M&M is well-placed to outperform across its core business, driven by a healthy recovery in rural areas and new product launches across both UV and tractor segments. We estimate M&M to post compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13 per cent/13 per cent/18 per cent in revenue/Ebitda/PAT over FY25–27E.
Bharti Airtel – Target: ₹2,110
Bharti's Q4FY25 performance was in-line. India wireless revenue/Ebitda grew 1 per cent/2 per cent quarter-on-quarter (Q-o-Q), offset by fewer days. Consolidated net debt inched up by ₹5,000 crore due to the redemption of $1 billion perpetual bonds.
We continue to favour BHARTI's superior execution on premiumisation. Robust free cash flow (FCF) of ₹9,700 crore/₹39,000 in Q4/FY25, along with moderating capex, should lead to significant FCF generation of ₹1 trillion in FY26-27E. We model a 14 per cent/17 per cent CAGR in Bharti's consolidated revenue/Ebitda (FY25-28E) driven by an expected 15 per cent India wireless tariff hike (December 2025), faster home broadband growth, and continued strong double-digit growth in Africa.
Mid Cap
Punjab National Bank – Target: ₹125
PNB reported a Q4FY25 PAT of ₹4,570 crore (+52 per cent Y-o-Y), in line with estimates, supported by better other income and a lower tax rate. However, NII missed due to a 12 basis points (bp) Q-o-Q decline in net interest margins (NIMs) to 2.81 per cent. Loan growth was healthy Y-o-Y at 15.3 per cent, though modest Q-o-Q; deposits rose 14.4 per cent Y-o-Y. Slippages surged 69 per cent Q-o-Q, mainly from MSME and agri loans, yet gross net performing asset/net non-performing asset (GNPA/ NNPA) ratios improved to 3.95 per cent/0.4 per cent. Management expects stable net interest margins (NIMs) (2.8–3 per cent) and credit growth of 11–12 per cent. With FY27E RoA/RoE at 1.05 per cent/15.5 per cent, improving asset quality, and strong recovery prospects, we reiterate 'Buy'.
Radico Khaitan – Target: ₹3,000
Radico Khaitan, a legacy player since 1943, is one of the oldest and largest IMFL manufacturers in India with a diverse portfolio across whisky, vodka, gin, rum, and brandy (ranging from ₹500 to ₹8,000), covering a large customer base. Driven by consistent volume growth (from 20 million cases in FY15 to 31m in FY25) and sharp execution, Radico has outperformed peers through premiumisation and is now expanding its premium and luxury portfolio to strengthen trade and consumer pull. With an 8 per cent IMFL market share and rising presence in the P&A segment, we estimate a robust 6 per cent/22 per cent/30 per cent in revenue/Ebitda/adjusted PAT CAGR during FY25-28E. Overall volume is projected at 9 per cent, driven by a robust 15 per cent CAGR in the P&A portfolio.
Small Cap
Niva Bupa – Target: ₹100
Niva Bupa reported 18 per cent/25 per cent Y-o-Y growth in Gross Written Premium/Net Earned Premium in Q4, driven by 3 per cent/59 per cent/18 per cent growth in retail health /group health/PA businesses. It secured business from two large corp. accounts, significantly contributing to strong growth in group health. With a Y-o-Y expansion of 50bp/190bp in commission/expense ratios, the combined ratio improved to better-than-expected 92.8 per cent, up 340 bp Y-o-Y.
Measures taken to mitigate claim inflation will continue to aid loss ratios, while op. efficiency will lead to improved expense ratio going forward. We believe Niva is well-positioned to harness growth opportunities with a strategic global partner, a growing customer base, and innovative product offerings. The diversified channel mix will ensure improved scalability as the company moves toward geographic expansion.
Marico – Target: ₹800
Marico (MRCO) reported Q4FY25 revenue growth of 20 per cent Y-o-Y, with domestic revenue up 23 per cent driven by strong core category performance and new growth drivers. International revenue grew 11 per cent. Ad spends rose 35 per cent, leading to a 260 bp Y-o-Y contraction in Ebitda margin to 16.8 per cent, while Ebitda grew 4 per cent against 7 per cent estimate.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Mint
7 hours ago
- Mint
For Sai Srinivas of Mobile Premier League, the game is always on
It's easy for people to put a value to a loss they've had," says Garimella Sai Srinivas Kiran, the co-founder of gaming company M-League, which runs the Mobile Premier League (MPL). '(But) It's hard to put a value to these intangible gains, right? You only notice them in the long term. In the short term, you only see the pain." Startup founders tend to be philosophical, a by-product of betting big on a non-existent product and making it work, despite the obstacles and the body blows. The seven-year-old skill-gaming platform MPL. which has free and paid components and a portfolio of over 60 games, probably does not qualify as a startup anymore, but tends to fall into the bracket by virtue of being a tech company. M-League, which now has five companies including the Berlin-based GameDuell, has a portfolio that includes skill gaming, free-to-play games, game publishing and AAA game studio (high-budget, high-profile games). With over 220 million users across MPL and GameDuell in 32 countries, a unicorn valuation as of the last fund raise in 2021, presence in Asia, Europe, North America and Africa, and 600-odd employees, the company straddles the challenging business of skill gaming. Its revenue in FY24 was $130 million. Sai was in Mumbai in early May for the World Audio Visual and Entertainment Summit (Waves), a government-sponsored event. In the business centre of the Sofitel Hotel in Bandra Kurla Complex, close to the venue for Waves where MPL had a booth, the 37-year-old, dressed casually in a collared T-shirt, slacks and a cap, orders an Americano. He has an easy-going manner, and a dimpled boyish smile that he uses liberally. Sai is temporarily stationed in Singapore these days, where M-League is headquartered, while his co-founder Shubh Malhotra and Galactus Funware Technology Pvt Ltd, the operating entity for MPL, are based in Bengaluru. Since losing his father last year, Sai says he has started valuing his time more and separating his professional and personal identities. 'One of my core philosophies in life is anonymity. I want to focus on my business," he explains. 'I really enjoy travelling; I can travel literally 60 days with one suitcase, keep moving from one place to the other." Born in Hyderabad—his father was a deputy manager in a bank, mother a teacher in a government school—Sai's academic journey fell into two innings. He was 'not very good" in the beginning, but an inexplicable switch turned after class VI. By the time he reached the board exam stage, he wanted to study aerospace engineering. Also read: What Siddharth Roy Kapur wants: Fresh stories told in unique voices He got into IIT Kanpur which had, among other things, a dedicated leased line for fast (for those times) internet speed. However, he soon became disenchanted with the education system there and his enthusiasm for making aircraft withered away. 'For people coming from a normal background like us, the first important level of freedom we need to attain is mastery of our time," says Sai, who graduated in 2010 as one of the few in his batch without a campus placement. One of his highlights at IIT turned out to be organising the cultural festival, Antaragni, which included the music festival Synchronicity. What this first, quasi-entrepreneurial voluntary role did was to get him access to his first job, which was a brief stint as product manager with a digital company in Delhi. He was soon recruited by Zynga in Bengaluru as a game designer, though he had no such experience. 'I played a lot of games while growing up," he admits. 'My dad and I were always particular about getting new gadgets, like the Nokia 3310 and the (gaming console) Super Nintendo." Zynga, with its popular game Farmville, was going 'absolute gangbusters" at the time, which put Sai in the 'right place, right time". It also helped that he didn't like Delhi too much and moving to Bengaluru was not a challenge. The third benefit, unbeknownst to him at the time, was that the friend's place he temporarily stayed at had another roommate, Malhotra. A year-and-a-half later, Sai and Malhotra got ready with their first venture, CREO Tech. Their first product, Tewee, was a wireless HDMI dongle to stream videos over a Wi-Fi network, like the Amazon Firestick. The idea seemed to fit in at a time when streaming services were making their forays into the country. 'We were foolish enough to say let's make hardware," he says now. 'We used to download these documents in Chinese and spend days translating them and figuring out what they hacked our way to getting the product out." They sold over 50,000 units, but making hardware was challenging. Other similar products were getting into the market; the duo realised they needed to pivot. In the company of some 'smart engineers" they hired through their college network, their next venture was an Android-based operating system and smartphone, which also turned out to be an error in hindsight. 'I'll tell you the problem with making a phone and with hardware in general," he says. 'For example, let's assume I ship software and I left a bug in it. I'm just going to patch the software and I'll fix it. Life is okay, all good. With hardware, even if you make one mistake, the amount of time it's going to take to correct that mistake in the next iteration and then get it right—it's just massive." After several struggles, managing to make only a few thousand of the product Creo Mark 1, they sold the company to messenger service Hike in 2016-17. 'If a river is flowing downstream and you're standing on the bank and you see this guy on a boat going really fast, you tend to assume that it's the person rowing. But it's actually the underlying river. That's the market: If you're in the right place, right time, right market, even if you are really stupid, you'll be okay," says Sai. After going through a period of angst, when they felt like they would never work together again, Malhotra and Sai made a deal not to have friends as employees, and that 'the outcome is always more important than output". Having decided that their next turn would be in the field of online gaming, because of his experience in the field, the newly formed Galactus Funware went live with the MPL in September 2018. With about $5.5 million ( ₹36.5 crore at the time) at the get-go, a fairly large seed round, from Sequoia Capital, their ascent was rapid—a term sheet in April, an early team by May and the first prototype by July. A friends and family round by end of August leading up to the launch. By December, MPL had a million daily active users. But the challenges were continuous and constant. In May 2019, MPL was kicked out of the Play Store due to Google's developer policy (it relaxed its policy on real-money gaming last year), along with other gaming platforms like Dream11. 'We would be the only company in India's ecosystem that started, raised a lot of money, got to a million daily active users and shut its doors within the year," Sai says grinning. Then by the second half of 2019 they almost ran out of money, looking to raise a bridge round which came in the form of $90m led by Susquehanna Asia Venture Capital. '2019 for me was the most foundationally painful year. If Creo was tough from a different standpoint, this was toughness induced by my own stupidity," he says. Cricketer Virat Kohli came on board as their brand ambassador. The following year, MPL signed on with the Board of Control for Cricket in India to be the kit sponsor for the Indian team. With the pandemic, the founders had to navigate working remotely, and between 2020-21, the company went from 120 employees to 1,200, perhaps hiring too many people too fast. 'In my 10 years of doing start-ups, I believe, that is the most unpardonable mistake," he admits. As MPL went global, especially into the US in July 2021, and acquired European company GameDuell in early 2022, 'one of the smartest things to have done", it also laid off 10% of its force and shut down its Indonesia office. But the business, on the back of the pandemic-induced lockdown that catalysed the online gaming industry, grew by 50%. Just when 2023 seemed on the up, hitting 200 million users and a foray into Africa, the government in August announced a 28% GST on funds online gaming companies collect from customers. Mint had in November quoted a report by gaming-focused venture capital firm Lumikai, which had India's gaming market growing 23% year-on-year by revenue to $3.8 billion in 2023-24 despite 28% GST on online gaming. Propelled by the pandemic-induced lockdowns, online gaming is booming, despite some amount of social stigma, and some legal battles, most of which have been dismissed by the courts. 'We looked at this entire GST thing and said this is essentially the start line being redrawn," remembers Sai. MPL laid off 350 employees—half of its force—to survive the tax burden in 2023. Recovery was aided by GameDuell, which helped grow revenue more than three times. MPL started to take off in the US and Brazil, with 40% of its current revenues coming from abroad. 'It's a personal ambition that we want to build a product that stands globally," Sai explains. 'The professional ambition is that things are evolving in a developing country, so there is no certainty for a business to thrive." While MPL as a business competes with platforms like WinZO and Zupee among others, it is more comparable to Nazara Technologies, which is publicly listed. Sai, though, prefers to see his competition coming from Chinese gaming conglomerate Tencent. As he gets ready to head back to Waves, he talks about reading, spending a lot of time just being idle, really enjoying the mundane. 'One of the reasons why I enjoy living in Singapore," he says thoughtfully, 'or spending time with my partner in Dubai, is that in India, these amazing pleasures of doing your own domestic chores have been taken away thanks to the massive amount of help, which is great. But I really enjoy doing my breakfast, putting my clothes in these daily rituals." Also read: Vaibhav Kala of Aquaterra Adventures: The outdoors man
Time of India
14 hours ago
- Time of India
2 convicted to 5 years in 68cr bank fraud case
Mumbai: A magistrate's court on Thursday convicted and sentenced two men, Raza Naqvi (38) and Varun Rana (41), to five years of rigorous imprisonment for their involvement in a sophisticated financial fraud amounting to Rs 68.22 crore against Shinhan Bank in 2020. Naqvi and Rana were found guilty of flouting norms by sending Rs 68 crore in two months to companies in the US and Singapore. The fraudulent scheme involved crediting significant amounts into accounts in Mumbai (M/s ID Technologies Private Limited) and Delhi (M/s Liqus Tradex Private Limited). Instructions were then given to immediately remit equivalent sums in foreign currency, primarily to Singapore and the US. The fraud, which took place between Sept and Dec 2020, came to light after Shinhan Bank's New Delhi branch received a notice from the Cyber Cell, Odisha Police, regarding suspicious activities in M/s Liqus Tradex Pvt Ltd's account. This prompted an internal inquiry by the bank's Compliance Department, which uncovered high-volume, high-value domestic transactions inconsistent with the account holder's profile. Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Direct shopping From Adidas Franchise Store... Adidas Buy Now Undo Further investigations revealed that the photographs on identity documents (Aadhaar and PAN cards) submitted for opening accounts for both M/s Liqus Tradex Pvt. Ltd (New Delhi) and M/s ID Technologies Pvt Ltd (Mumbai) were identical, despite bearing different names. While another accused, Sumit Verma, was acquitted, two others, Anuj Kumar Chand and Sunita Devi, remain absconding. Public prosecutor Pravina Patil argued that it is a white-collar crime and had a significant effect on society. In a 60-page judgment, the magistrate stated that evidence from prosecution witnesses established that Raza Naqvi appeared before Shinhan Bank officials and participated in the account opening process of M/s ID Technologies Pvt Ltd by falsely identifying himself as Santosh Kumar. "Subsequently, this account was used to carry out large-scale foreign remittances amounting to Rs 68 crore, based on documents and representation believed to be genuine by bank officials. ..," additional chief judicial magistrate RD Chavan said. The magistrate said that prosecution evidence proved that accused Varun Rana posed as Jogendrasingh and represented himself as a director of M/s ID Technologies Pvt Ltd to Shinhan Bank. "Real Jogendra Singh has categorically denied having opened any such account…," the magistrate said. Get the latest lifestyle updates on Times of India, along with Eid wishes , messages , and quotes !
Time of India
20 hours ago
- Time of India
ETtech Deals Digest: Startups raise $142.7 million this week, up 8.5% on-year
Live Events Startups in India raised $142.7 million in funding across 14 rounds between May 31 and June 6, up 8.5% over the same week last the same period last year, startups had raised $131.5 million across 64 rounds. Funding fell marginally over the last week, where $147.7 million was raised in 16 activity was high among late and early-stage startups, lagging in the seed Singapore-based wealth management platform raised $53 million in a fresh funding round, led by two UK-based family offices. In August 2024, the company had raised $27 million as part of the same round, and this extension takes the total funds raised in the round to $80 (B2B) ecommerce platform Udaan closed a $114 million funding round led by existing investors M&G Prudential (UK) and Lightspeed Venture Partners. The round, executed at a flat valuation of $1.8 billion, includes the previously disclosed $75 million infusion from the two investors, which founder and CEO Vaibhav Gupta had announced during a townhall earlier this wealthtech startup, which provides digital fixed-return investment products, raised $20 million (Rs 173 crore) in a funding round led by Infosys cofounder Nandan Nilekani's Fundamentum digital lending platform Loantap announced raising $6.2 million in fresh equity funding led by July Ventures. Existing investors 3one4 Capital, Avaana Capital, Kae Capital and the Swapurna Family Office also participated in the financing startup GyanDhan has raised Rs 50 crore in a funding round from edtech firm Classplus and venture capital firm Pravega Ventures. The funds will be used for scaling operations, strengthening its consultant partnership network, expanding the team, and investing in furniture and home goods company Pepperfry raised Rs 43.3 crore from existing investors Norwest Venture Partners, Goldman Sachs, General Electric Pension Trust, Growth Equity Opportunity Fund, and Panthera Growth Partners, among a climate-tech-focussed asset financing and management platform, raised $3.5 million in a funding round led by the clean mobility-focused Micelio Technology Fund.
