Some earnings surprised on the upside: Forsyth Partners

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Head-Offshore Equity Analysis at Forsyth Partners, Jacqueline Aldhous believes that the Indian markets are at an all-time high and that some earnings have surprised on the upside.

Aldhous also states that there is a lot of risk in terms of competitive pressures and wage growth. In terms of relative value, although there have been some winners in the large cap space, she feels that midcaps have under performed this year and they offer relative value.

Excerpts from CNBC - TV18's exclusive interview with Jacqueline Aldhous:

Q: How have you read the earnings that India has posted so far? What is your call on Sensex at these levels?

A: Obviously, it is at an all time high and some earnings have surprised very much on the upside. I think from here, it is very important to look at where earnings go from here.

Obviously, we have got quite a lot of risk in terms of competitive pressures and also in terms of wage growth. A lot of the companies are keen to keep staff rather than have high levels of attrition and so mostly the earnings have been positive.

The managers I speak to, because I invest in a lot of domestic mutual funds, basically are really drilling down and looking at the earnings pressure, the earnings visibility and also sustainability of earnings, I really think that the view is that there will be very strong winners and there will be losers.

So for example, in IT, they are looking at large companies like Infosys and Wipro. Since some of the smaller players face more competitive pressures, companies like Infosys  and Wipro will be major global winners. I mean they already are, but they will grow in strength and some of the smaller ones will suffer.

So I think from here, it really is very company-specific. I think there are some sectors, which do have better margins. They have less pressure, so there may be areas like media, capital goods, cement, consumer related and some of the IT services and telecom where there has been very strong subscriber growth. Some of the auto companies like Bajaj Auto  do not really have these competitive pressures. Although they had good volume growth, they had pressures on their operating margins due to the fact that they had to discount.

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