While welcoming the recent government reform push for having a positive impact on market sentiment, Managing Director and CEO, Kotak Investment Banking, Mr T.V.Raghunath said that it was too early to uncork the bubbly just as yet.
"The recent reform push has been good for sentiment and flows have started to come. This will in turn have a potential ruboff effect on corporates who will finally be able to push through their fundraising plans.We can expect several Offers for Sale, Institutional Placement Programme etc to come up, but it all depends on how inflation and capital formation scenario plays out. However the last ten days definitely reflect courage on part of the government and if it continues to gain momentum and stay course we could see a sustained improvement in fundamentals."
Mr Raghunath said that the funding for corporates which was a tad difficult owing to lack of equity would see an unclogging which will have its spinoffs if they manage to deleverage. He said, "The pipeline is looking positive but it may not be time to uncork the bubbly as one has to see whether the investors who are coming into the secondary market are being selective and picky about companies and are more broad based. Deals of companies that are well run and have good governance track record should go through," he added. Asked about whether we could see a revival in IPO market, he said IPOs have a longer lead time and therefore would be difficult to estimate at this point of time.
On his plans for positioning Kotak Investment Banking in the industry, he said that the bank would try to focus on the mid market segment. Giving an overview of the around $50 billion mergers and acquisitions market, he said about half of this was done in about 8 to 10 deals - which were high end. While the bank would obviously target this segment, there were about 250 odd deals that are done for about $ 15 billion which provided plenty of opportunities for his bank, he said.
He said the Investment bank would also look at entering into geography based alliances in existing partner countries such as U.S, U.K , Japan but also tap new areas such as Africa, Asean countries comprising South Malaysia and Vietnam as well as Australia. They had already done about 6 deals in Japan over the past two years and were among the top 8 Investment bank alliances in UK & US. "We are forging a business model to target the around $15 billion worth of deal segment that are done by the broader corporate India. This would include the cross border deals," he said.