Sale of commercial vehicles sees y-o-y growth
Auto players across all segments continued to clock strong growth in their sales volumes in the month of April 2018. Factors like expectation of good monsoon, improved rural sentiments and investment in infrastructure are leading to strong demand across all auto segments.
Tata Motors cars division reported 17,235 unit sales, up 34% from the same period last year. Mahindra and Mahindra grew its unit sales by 13%. April was the 6th month of continuous growth in the passenger vehicle segment. Cumulative sales of commercial vehicles grew by 78% on year-on-year basis to 67,548 vehicles.
You can invest with the smallcase Auto tracker to benefit from growth in auto sales. The smallcase has returned 21.14% over the previous year compared to Nifty returns of 13.44%.
Draft national telecom policy released
Early last week, the government released the draft national telecom policy naming it as National Digital Communications Policy (NDCP) 2018. The policy seeks to increase the contribution of digital communications to India’s gross domestic product (GDP) to 8%, besides propelling India among the top 50 nations in the ICT development index. The draft also proposes to address the woes of the debt-ridden telecom sector by reviewing licence fees, spectrum usage charges, universal service obligation fund levy, all of which add to the cost of telecom services, under the new policy for enhancing ease of doing business in the sector.
In related news, in March 2018 telecom operators added 21.9 million subscribers. The performance in March is the best for the industry in over a year. Benefit from this trend by investing with Digital Inclusion smallcase.
Markets update
Markets closed marginally down during the truncated trading week. Sensex closed down 0.16% at 34,915.4 and Nifty closed down 0.69% at 10,618.25.
India’s manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) rose to 51.6 in April from 51.0 in March. This was the ninth consecutive month of improvement in manufacturing conditions. Services sector also continued their good show with Nikkei India services PMI increasing to 51.4 in April from 50.3 in March.
