Tumko maloom hai ki yeh ek paisa kya hota hai? Ek-Ek paisa jama karo to ek rupya banta hai. Ek-Ek rupya jama karo to 100 banta hai, 100 jama karo to hazaar banta hai. Hazaar hazaar jama karo to lakh aur lakh se crore banta hai. Yeh ek paisa, ek crore ka beej hai. Jo aadmi beej ki parvah nahi karega, wo na to fasal uga sakta hai, na phal pa sakta hai!
Hello Espresso Lovers! We are back after what felt like a never-ending week with over 200 results and a barrage of developments besides them. You may wonder why I would begin with the late Kadar Khan’s memorable lines from Dariya Dil (1987) before greeting you all? The lines may be a message to companies in a land far, far away that have embarked on incessant, eye-watering spending plans without any assurance that any of it will even return to them. And finally, it seems the investor community has started to take note and feel worried.
Perhaps this one meme is central to the entire episode of today. This is the question investors are finally beginning to ask the Magnificent Seven companies as they keep reporting their results. Just last year, the situation was the complete opposite. The more these companies spent, the bigger the capex guidance they announced, the faster the stocks ran. Investors thought the money spent would return faster than an answer generated by AI when given a prompt. Alas, that was not the case.
For a better part of this year, the spending plans were largely viewed positively as companies assured investors that this was being done only through their own internal cash flows. But then came debt. And then some more. Investors thought, okay, they are still generating enough cash to repay the debt. They’ll be fine. But when this spending binge began to show up in their results, the warning signs began to flash, the proverbial Khatre ki ghanti began to ring, and investors began to ask questions they should have asked a lot earlier – Will this money ever return?
Take a look at Alphabet – Google’s parent. For the first time in four years, its results missed expectations. In an ideal case scenario, investors would cut them some slack and say, it’s alright, the law of averages would have caught up someday. But no. There was a bigger devil in the detail. Its free cash flow was negative for the second quarter in a row. Not just that, it was almost 4.5x higher than what analysts had anticipated. The result? Stock falls 13%, the most in a single day since its IPO way back in 2004. $500 billion of market value wiped out in a single day. Worse still, they plan on spending more next year – $300 billion!
And Alphabet is not a stray incident. Most of the big tech companies that have reported results so far have reported negative free cash flows this quarter. Meta reported one for the first time after listing this quarter, and the stock was duly punished by investors for it as well. The same is the case with Amazon – negative free cash flow of $7 billion in the same quarter last year. This time? Wait for it…negative $42 billion. The only one that stood out? Microsoft. Still reported positive FCF even though it dropped 27% from last year. The question is, for how long it remains in positive territory if spending continues the way it has been.
And then comes Intel. The perfect synonym for “dead-man walking” for a better part of this year. Once a legend, almost driven to the border of irrelevance, administration picks up stake, things start looking up, stock runs, and runs hard. Gains almost 250% in just 7-8 months. Then comes the moment of truth. Numbers. Weaker than estimates. In fact, way weaker. Guidance disappoints. The Israel factory incident drags a $600 million hit over the next two quarters.
When a stock that has not done much disappoints, the investors choose to look away. But when you run faster than your legs can take, the fall is steeper, deeper, and more brutal. A 29% drop on Friday, the worst day since the 1970s. That’s one-third of your value gone in a matter of hours. The biggest loser? No. Not retail for a change. DONALD TRUMP! His administration’s stake took a $12 billion hit as a result of this fall. Wonder what he has to say on Truth Social about this, since he has gloated enough and more about Intel’s stock returns.
We brought this to you last week. The highlight of every earnings season. But this time around, there’s something different. Usually, when a stock would deliver good/bad numbers, the reaction to it would be limited to a day, max two. This time around, stocks with good numbers have continued to move higher, while those with bad ones have just not stopped correcting.
Ather Energy is the best example of this. The stock had corrected 20% to 25% from its previous highs, due to routine profit booking. Then came the results. First-ever profit. Not just EBITDA, but PAT level as well. Add to that some capacity expansion plans and strong management commentary. The street was as joyous as it could be. A 27% move last week on the upside, the best performer on the Nifty 500, and back at new highs as well!
On the flip side, there is CarTrade Tech – the potential “wild child” of the market. A ₹1,600 IPO falls to ₹350, then goes back to ₹3,000 plus, and then falls from there again. For a company growing between 20% and 30% every quarter, a 10% growth quarter was difficult to digest for the market. Yes, the festive season shifted compared to the base quarter, but 10% was just not acceptable to the street. The result? Down 23% this week, the worst Nifty 500 performer, now down 35% from those very highs that it had surged to and made the market sit up and take note.
Financial educator, speaker and author, Alan Miltz gave a very popular quote: “Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, and cash is king!” Right now, the big techs are showing complete disregard for the same King that once gave them the trillion-dollar crowns they now sit on. Majrooh Saab (the great late Majrooh Sultanpuri) was not a visionary for no reason that he wrote Sabse Bada Rupaiyaa all the way back in 1976, and those lines hold true more than ever 50 years later! The whole thing is that ki Bhaiyya… sabse bada rupaiyaa!
Festivities begin for Diwali next week – the festival of lights and from all of us at CNBC-TV18, we wish you all a happy, prosperous and joyous Diwali and New Year. We are only grateful for your love, appreciation and feedback, and we hope that the festival brings plenty of light to your lives and the new year turns out to be a lot better than what this one has been! We’ll see you next week with the latest brew! Happy Diwali to one and all!