All round buying aids indices

Wed, 17 Feb 11:30 am

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The Indian markets continued to trade on a strong note during the previous two hours of trade. Currently, buying activity is being witnessed across all sectors with stocks from metal, consumer durables, auto and capital goods sectors leading the pack of gainers.

The BSE-Sensex and the NSE-Nifty are currently trading higher by around 226 points and 66 points respectively. Stocks from the midcap and small cap spaces are also trading in the green, with the BSE-Midcap and the BSE-Smallcap indices trading higher by 1.3% each. The rupee is trading at 45.98 to the US dollar.

According to a leading business daily, India's largest private sector power utility, Tata Power has signed an MoU (Memorandum of Understanding) with a large Korean utility company for identifying and executing opportunities in Asia, West Asia and Africa. This MoU signed with Korea's East West Power Company (EWP) will focus towards initiating technical cooperation for finding operations and maintenance opportunities relating to third party generation assets.

It may be noted that Tata Power has an installed generation capacity of around 3000 MW, with a widespread presence in all the segments of power sector. This includes power generation (thermal, hydro, solar and wind), transmission, distribution and trading. We believe that this association will aid the company in expanding its operation and maintenance portfolio in India, Korea and other target markets.

As per a leading business daily, L&T is planning to invest around Rs 1.84 bn for expanding its ship-building capacity, particularly for the defense sector, by mid-2011. It may be noted that the company already has a ship-building yard at Hazira. However, due to some limitations, it cannot manufacture large ships there.

The company is setting up a new ship-building facility near Ennore port for producing large ships and submarines for the Indian Navy. It will use its land bank of around 1,200 acres near Chennai for building this facility. It may be worth noting that earlier, Indian government rejected company's joint venture with a Franco-German aerospace and defense group, EADS for providing services to the Indian defense sector. The company is in talks with the government for resolving the issue. We believe that by building adequate capacity the company will be able to leverage government's increased budgetary allocation for the defense sector.