ONGC stuck in range of Rs 900-1000

CNBC-TV18’s Executive Editor, Udayan Mukherjee - The way Cairn India has been moving and some of the oil exploration stocks have moved over the last one-month. I think the market already sensed and is trying to play exploration in an upstream. But disturbing reports are coming to the fore now on probably a diesel shortage because of an inability of the oil marketing companies to import. It had to get to this stage for the oil companies marketing companies, which has been taken for granted and now forget dividend payouts to the government. They just simply running out of cash they don’t have it. All that they have is a clutch full of government bonds or oil bonds. So you are reaching disturbing proportions with the problem.

Not many people in the market care much about HP and BP, Indian Oil Corp (IOC) as stocks so lets not obsess about them because they are forgotten as a sector. What worries me more is what is going to happen to ONGC because that’s not a forgotten stock it is a large weightage on the Index and is an important stock-still. Last year ONGC paid about Rs 20,000 crore of it’s bill or it’s share of the subsidy, oil subsidy losses. This year if it continues like this it could end up paying Rs 50,000 crore. So I am not surprised at ONGC is not keeping pace with Cairn India in fact gets stuck in the range of Rs 900-1,000 kind of mark because what profits will you make if you pay USD 13-14 billion of subsidy sharing and who knows the way it is going, the government might just ask ONGC since it still has positive cash flows to dole out more by way of subsidy sharing. So it is bad enough for ONGC potential of getting worse and this is something, which could be a little bit of a danger zone for the oil sector the way ONGC could move if things continue like this.

So forget all the other distortions, which are been caused by our great fuel policy in terms of consumption as well. So just keep an eye on what is going on I still think the only place to be perhaps is your upstream and exploration and oil marketing and probably sadly even ONGC is best left alone.