In today’s briefing:
- Seasonality Watch: Four Charts that Will Make You Go Hmm…
- The Week That Was in ASEAN@Smartkarma – Grab’s Moving Fast, Kalbe Farma Innovates, and SATS Rights
- India: Surging Tax Revenue Helps Lower PSBR, Ensuring Capex-Led Growth
- Rolling Up the Mid-Market
- CX Daily: China Grapples With Fiscal Overhaul as Budgets Come Under Pressure
Seasonality Watch: Four Charts that Will Make You Go Hmm…
- We find several similarities to the surprising spike in prices in August/September after the first peak in annualized price pressures in June-2022.
- We are at an ALL-TIME-HIGH spread between the CPI and the PCE in this category, which has been a growing issue since the pandemic.
- The tax-refund season has so far been relatively lukewarm compared to former years, but we are about to enter PEAK season this week. Positive for liquidity, all else equal.
The Week That Was in ASEAN@Smartkarma – Grab’s Moving Fast, Kalbe Farma Innovates, and SATS Rights
- The Week That Was in ASEAN@Smartkarma is filled with an eclectic mix of differentiated, substantive, and actionable insights, macro and equity bottom-up, from across South East Asia.
- The past week saw insights on Grab (GRAB US), Kalbe Farma (KLBF IJ), Pertamina Geothermal Energy (PGEO IJ), SATS (SATS SP), Boustead Projects (BOCJ SP), and Sea Ltd (SE US)
- There were also two insights looking at Singapore’s Budget and the macro implications from Manu Bhaskaran, who sees further monetary tightening on the cards.
India: Surging Tax Revenue Helps Lower PSBR, Ensuring Capex-Led Growth
- For a second consecutive year, fiscal policy is mildly contractionary while accommodating a 30%+ hike in public investment. Strong tax revenues help lower the fiscal deficit by 0.5% of GDP.
- Surging nominal GDP boosted corporate & income tax revenue by 16%YoY+ and central GST revenue by 30%YoY in Apr-Dec’22. Actual FY23 deficit will be 6% (rather than 6.4%) of GDP.
- We expect nominal GDP to grow 13% (vs 10.4% official projection) in FY24, cutting fiscal deficit to 5.5% of GDP, thus crowding-in private investment, enabling real GDP to grow 7.2%.
Rolling Up the Mid-Market
- Institutional Investors and Venture Funds have had a sharp reversal in fortunes over the past eighteen months, coming off the post-pandemic high to face the harsh reality of a severe recession, uncertain macroeconomic conditions, and a plunge in valuations of tech stocks.
- Despite this, Hedge Funds and Asset Management firms have largely outperformed other institutional investors, relying on alternative strategies and making unconventional bets.
- Wealth and Asset manager Alvarium Tiedmann, which recently merged through a $1.4 billion SPAC deal, is looking to disrupt the mid-market with its range of services and newfound scale.
CX Daily: China Grapples With Fiscal Overhaul as Budgets Come Under Pressure
- Local debts / In Depth: China grapples with fiscal overhaul as budgets come under pressure
- China-Russia /: China’s top diplomat hails Russia ties as ‘resilient, stable’ in meeting with Putin
- Children /: Chinese tech hub to offer handouts to families with more than one child
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