ICICI Ventures pulls out of JP Infra deal

CNBC-TV18’s Executive Editor, Udayan Mukherjee – Something is going on in JP Infra. JP Infra gets slam-dunked and then the management comes and say, “We are doing nothing.” The next day the stock falls even harder and the next even harder than that. It just keeps on grinding, lost half of its marektcap, no great recovery insight and now ICICI pulls out. These things cannot be coincidences; there is something going on which we are not privy to or we don’t know the bottom of but something is going on.
 
The easy explanation could be that in the heydays of the bull market where valuations were very ripe, a lot of deals got stuck and now the prices have come off. Renegotiations, resets are happening and some of the deals are getting pulled. But this is a deal between ICICI Ventures stable entity - let’s do the deal and tomorrow pickup the phone and say, “now prices have collapsed we won’t do the deal.” I don’t think these are immature entities. So maybe there is something which has happened in JP Infratech which we cannot put a finger on and the market will not like the sound of what’s gone on.
 
If we talk to a lot of people on the street; institutional and large investors, they still seem very pissed off with what happened with JP Infratech. So I am not clear what exactly happened but something has happened for ICICI to pullout too.
 
But I think one will hear more of these things happening now. A case in point was Kishor Biyani pulling out of Dish TV. He did a deal at Rs 100 on Dish TV because that was a great company and great media vehicle. Suddenly he finds the stock has halved after the correction and it doesn’t look like such a great media vehicle after all. So he picked up the phone to the Subash Chandra and Jawahar Goel saying, “I want out of this deal because I can buy buckets of this stock at Rs 60 in the secondary market now.” So that story also which will play out but I suspect there is more to JP Infratech thing.