RIL tumbles on institutional selling

RIL was done in by sustained offloading from a US-based fund, falling 5.41% to Rs 277.20 in the bargain.

By 11:27 IST, volumes of over 1.07 million shares were notched up on the counter on BSE. The share came off its intra-day high of Rs 294.90 by then.

As per market buzz, a US-based fund has offloaded around 1 million shares on the counter on Tuesday. Foreign institutional investors have been continuously selling in RIL over the last couple of sessions, though the market has failed to fathom the reason behind this selling.

Perhaps it is the concerns over future growth that is deluging the counter following huge investments made by the company in its new telecom venture. The telecom sector is facing a recession on a global scale and the company's telecom venture is not believed to be generating the expected revenues.

There have been reports that the company has even postponed its telecom launch, which was scheduled for 1 May 2003.

There are expectation that demand for the Reliance Infocomm service will drop once Reliance Infocomm charges 30 paise per SMS or text messaging (as per reports) to other GSM networks like Airtel, BPL Mobile, Idea or Hutch. Reliance had, in fact, promised this service free of charge. The new development arises because Reliance Infocomm intends to pass on all inter-connect charges levied by other operators to its consumers. Not only the SMS, but outgoing calls too will cost more than 40 paise as promised by the company, as they too will attract off-net (interconnect) charges. Even voicemail will not be free anymore.

RIL has been reported to have discovered additional gas reserves in the Bay of Bengal. The gas reserves in the newly-discovered block are estimated at nine trillion cubic feet. There are expectations that in the long term RIL would benefit from the gas find in the Krishna Godavari basin.

Late October 2002, RIL said that its Krishna-Godavari basin (Andhra Pradesh) gas project would go on stream around mid-2004. The cost of development of the project could total $1.3 billion, it added.

RIL is basically a petrochemicals maker (the largest in the country) and a petroleum refiner (after it merged group company Reliance Petroleum with itself). The company has emerged as one among the largest private sector players in the oil exploration segment as well.

RIL registered impressive results for the third quarter ended 31 December 2002. It posted a 24% rise in net profit to Rs 1,083 crore (Rs 10.83 billion), compared to Rs 873 crore (Rs 8.73 billion) in the corresponding period of the previous year. Total income increased by 7.58% to Rs 11,243 crore (Rs 112.43 billon) from Rs 10,450 crore (Rs 104.5 billion) in DQ 2001. The figures for the corresponding previous period have been restated to include the effect of the amalgamation of Reliance Petroleum with RIL with effect from 1 April 2001.

RIL is scheduled to unveil its FY 2003-03 ended 31 March 2003 on 23 April 2003.

The promoters hold 43.7% equity stake in RIL, while the public, domestic and foreign institutions hold 15.3%, 13% and 26.4% respectively.

BSE code: 500325