Current fall good time to spot wealth-making ideas: UTI MF

Corrections like the one the market is currently undergoing are great opportunities for investors to buy stocks to make over a three-four year period, says Lalit Nambiar, fund manager with UTI Asset Management Company.In an interview with CNBC-TV18's Anuj Singhal and Ekta Batra, Nambiar said UTI, which manages about Rs 92,000 crore in assets spread across debt and equity, is evaluating opportunities to invest in stocks that are becoming bargain buys."The market could go down further," he said. "But you can't catch the bottom. If you get a good stocks, you buy."Nambiar said he was more a bottoms-up stock picker, and wouldn't make a sector call, except to say he found values in some auto stocks and which he believed would benefit as the economy and consumable incomes crank up.Below is the transcript of the interview on CNBC-TV18.Anuj: What is your sense do you think the market is set for deeper correction from here on and the bigger question is the buy opportunity now or do you think the market will give even better buying opportunity may be three or six months down the line?A: It is very difficult; we have always maintained it is very difficult to time these things. You have global currents and cross currents which can affect India among other markets. Our story in terms of economic recovery, in terms of cyclical recovery has not changed. I will reiterate that, we have said that many times. These corrections are typically opportunities from a three to four year perspective to buy and create wealth.Having said that trying to catch the bottom is always like trying to catch a falling knife. So, if there are stocks out there which look like good value, good bargains from a three to four years perspective I think it is worth buying. That is the lesson we learnt from the previous bull markets from the 2003-2008 one to be precise. The previous rally which we saw was more of price to earnings (PE) expansion one. The earnings have yet to show through. When the market get its confidence back in terms of earnings recovery possibly in a couple of quarter from now when there is some traction on ground when sales and volumes pick up I think you have action coming back to the market. It is going to be very difficult to tell precisely when that is going to happen so if there are stocks on the radar which look good fundamentally it is a great time to buy in my opinionEkta: Any sector reallocation that you are undertaking at this point in time booking out of may be some sectors and increasing exposure in some? Any sort of changes that you are making may be exiting from certain sectors, increasing exposure in some?A: It is more stock specific. There are some places where we would like to take profits we are taking profits there. Some places where we would like to begin entering. We are yet to see significant corrections in some stocks where the stories were sentiment driven and there possibly was some amount of interest from the foreign institutional investors (FIIs) and with those people exiting possibly you will get bargains there and that is what we are looking at. So, selectively buying some of those stocks not really a sectoral kind of call more a stock specific call.Anuj: Autos, auto ancillaries we have seen quite a bit of correction except for a couple of names like Maruti Suzuki. Is this a space that you like?A: We continue to like autos, more an India story and consumption story. There was always a story in ancillaries as far as exports are concerned. Some sentiment impact from stories from outside India especially the Volkswagen controversy so that probably is going to have some impact because these people are big suppliers. We are going to see some sympathetic impact there in few of those stocks. Some of them have run-up very dramatically if I am say so. So you are going to see some kind of retreat there. However, if you leave that aside India consumption story is probably one of the things which will play out over the next few years when we see the pay commission and the one rank one pension etc coming through in incomes of people. That is going to be a big boost for Indian consumption which we can play through the car demand especially the auto segment so that is what we are looking at.Ekta: What about niche sectors says something like media space? We generally don’t talk about that but even if you are talking about consumption eventually where would you see the likes of the General Entertainment Channel platform or even the likes of the Dish TV of the world?A: One part of that was the digitisation play. There was the aspect of even some cable companies trying to play the third level and fourth level of digitisation. However, that story is more or less played out. Now it is about creating space for each other. At least in the cable space people have sort of reorganised themselves. You could say they virtually have a good understanding on how to deal with the local cable operator. Perhaps now you are not going to see margin slippage. You are probably going to see growth and that growth will translate into volumes and topline for these companies. As far as the Dish level companies are concerned those who provide Dish level services there also you are seeing some kind of stability. So, now from here on it is going to be a question of growth more through price led growth, more through cost saving rather than dramatic volume growth. That is the way we look at it.Anuj: Do you think it is time to get into the so called safe havens like IT and pharmaceutical because even there we haven’t seen decisive trend. We have seen big correction in pharmaceutical stocks for example, couple of IT stocks have corrected. Infosys has been strong of course but other than we haven’t seen trends. Is that as space that you would like to get into or allocate incremental money?A: IT continues to look reasonably good I don’t think there is a much to worry on the technology spend in the US as of now. I don’t think there is a real issue with respect to the fact that you have a tailwind coming from the rupee falling. So, that is a positive for Indian IT sector, we are constructive on IT.