Saturday, February 27, 2010

Union Budget 2010-11

fiscal consolidation was the theme of the budget says Vallabh Bhansali, Uday Kotak, Madhu Kela, Nirmal Jain, Narayana Murthy, Sandeep Sabharwal, Mark Mobius, Nilesh Jain, Sunil Mittal...nd many more.

so i am guessing, fiscal consolidation is the theme ! :I

No Bad news is Good news for the markets. The rollback of stimulus measures was on expected lines.

MAT (Minimum Alternate Tax) increase from 15% to 18% is negative but is mostly offset by reduction in surcharge from 10% to 7.5%

For Salaried Individuals, it was a windfall gain of upto 50,000 rupees per person!
only 10% tax on income upto Rs 5 lacs. 20% on 5-8lacs and 30% on income above 8 lacs.

Service Tax rate was maintaned at 10% which is a very positive surprise.

Direct Tax Code will be implemented from April 1, 2011 and datz very BAD bcoz the existing draft looks very bad in so much as it treats Long Term Capital Gains at par with Short Term Capital gains and taxes it at slab rates, which means upto 30%!

Nifty closed at 4925, below 4950 breakout level, so again, markets are direction less as of now..

Fiscal Deficit of 380,000 crores is expected to be maintained and hence the Bond markets did not see any major swings in the prices.

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Nuclear Power, Railway Budget


RAILWAY BUDGET - no hike in passenger fares
No increase in Freight Tariff also.

NUCLEAR power

Macquarie's Inderjeet Bhatia and Somesh Agarwal have written a cool report on Nuclear sector opportunities in indian stocks.

Nuclear Power Corporation India Limited ('NPCIL') is the nodal agency for nuclear power generation in INdia just as PowerGrid is the nodal agency for power transmission across the national grid.

NPCIL has 17 running power plants of mostly 220MW each, aggregating 4,100MW and 5 more under construction with 2,660MW capacity in total, mostly at Kudankulam.

The 1st 2 plants had boiler water reactor (BWR) while the rest are all Pressurised Heavy Water Reactor ('PHWR') Technology based.

all reactors operate on natural Uranium (99.3% U238 and 0.7% U235). The Dept of Atomic Energy ('DAE') refines Uranium and converts

This creates order opportunity for project players like L&T, BHEL. HCC, Siemens, Gammon.

post Agreement 123 and the Nuclear Supplies Group (NSG) waiver, India has recently signed fuel supply agreements with USA, France, Russia, Kazakastan and Mongolia.

Today, only 4% of India's Power Generation comes from Nuclear power, vis-a-vis
EU,Japan, S.Korea - 30%; USA - 20%. China is increasing from 9,000MW to 70,000MW by 2020, with 37 new reactors planned of which 20 are under construction.

Stats