PSU power cos surge on hopes of increase in govt spending

Excerpts from Bazaar on CNBC-TV18 Watch the full show » ALSO READ See what other CNBC-TV18 anchors have to say Nifty BSE | NSE 25/05/12 Are Mutual Funds betting on Nifty?

Here is a verbatim transcript of Udayan Mukherjee's comments on CNBC-TV18.

We have seen construction rallying and people in the market are getting more and more hopeful about government spending now and maybe justifiably so. Just look at what China has done, they are just laying out 20% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) over the next couple of years to shore the economy up. Things to that extent may not happen because our fiscal finances are not in great shape.

But I just heard over the weekend that the Commerce Minister telling Karan Thapar that they are talking about Rs 25,000 crore number. Now that number may well become larger, if the government perceives that they need to spend more. If government spending actually happens furiously, then you would want to bet on some of these plays like the government owned power utility, power generation companies.

So it is no surprise that in the last few days Neyveli Lignite, Power Grid, NTPC those kinds of stocks are giving you the rallies. So I think it is an expectation that the government will have to up spending that finally things for power generation companies will not be allowed to go very sour. Because that is a very important sector and if thwarted or if bottled up, then there is lot of rub off which does not happens elsewhere.

Also the fact that interest rates have come down, so if you look at some of these PSU type power companies, interest rates going down is a very substantial boost to them. So it is a bit of government spending expectation, plus interest rates going down for a which some of these power names have bounced up, and they may well continue their rally for a bit. In fact people have gone to the extent of saying, they have read research reports suggesting BHEL may be a better bet than Larsen & Toubro (L&T) because BHEL spending comes from the government, which is a bit more assured than private sector spending at this point in time.