Conference Calls and Earnings Call Transcripts for NSE and BSE Stocks

Conference Call with Escorts Limited Management and Analysts on Q4FY20 and Full Year Earnings Performance and Outlook. Listen in to the full earnings transcript.

Conference Call with Kotak Mahindra Bank Management and Analysts on Q4FY20 Earnings Performance and Outlook. Listen in to the full earnings transcript. 

Remarks from Uday Kotak, Managing Director of Kotak Mahindra Bank

• Looks like Covid is likely to stay here for longer than we expected. There is no immediate cure or vaccine - we will have to continue and deal with it at least for a while.

• While lockdowns may be necessary from a health perspective, is that lockdowns have an exponential cost to the economy. We need to move to a gradually normalizing economy. There is a wide variation in expectation in economic cost from the lockdowns - from 1.9% from the IMF to other estimates coming in at over -5%. 

• Our focus going forward? 1) Strong balance sheet: this has significant weightage in terms of strategy 2) Strong and trusted deposit franchise. We are good on both sides. Our deposits grew at 20%. 86% of our deposits are CASA deposits. 

• In the post covid world we need to look at our lending business in a different manner 1) Which sectors 2) Cautious on individual companies with high fixed operating costs 3) Cautious on businesses with high leverage. 

• Guaranteed loans from the government would help us grow in those cases. 

• Focused on customer acquisition on the digital route. We are adding 14,000 new customer accounts everyday through our digital acquisition channel. We will spend more on technology rather than less. 

• We are also flexible on the kind of segments we lend to, rather than follow the herd. 

• On customer franchise - we see an opportunity to grow this in the non credit side. 

• We see the financial sector as it navigates through this turbulence going through a consolidation phase as we go forward. We will continue focus on navigating through this time. At the same time we will keep an eye on potential opportunities here. 

Conference Call with Godrej Consumer Products Management and Analysts on Q4FY20 and Full Year Earnings Performance and Outlook. Listen in to the full earnings transcript. 

Call Participants: Nisaba Godrej - Executive Chairperson, Vivek Gambhir - MD & CEO, V Srinivasan - CFO & Company Secretary, Sameer Shah - Head of Finance, 

Key Highlights from Vivek Gambhir

It's a pleasure to speak to all of you. Good evening! Hope all of you are safe and healthy. I think whichever way you look at it, it has been a weak performance overall in Q4. The details are there in the presentation that has been shared. We want to spend more time on discussing how we are preparing to deal with the evolving situation and share our perspectives why we believe we are well positioned to emerge stronger. 

As you all know, this quarter was an unprecedented period due to the spread of the Covid-19 epidemic across the globe impacting all the geographies of our operations. At GCPL, we worked first on safety ensuring that the employees and business partners are safe and taking all the necessary precautions to control the spread of Covid-19. Godrej group in solidarity with people and government efforts earmarked an initial outlay of INR 50 crores for community support and relief initiatives in India. We ensured adhering to the lockdown and in parallel worked with government authorities to revive supply chain operations for essential items. 

During this quarter, we witnessed steady demand in mid March 2020. At that time, out teams were quite optimistic and hopeful of a decent quarter. However, the spread of the virus and the eventual lockdown in geographies of our operations resulted in virtually no sales in the later part of March 2020 significantly impacting our sales performance in the quarter. This resulted in a weak performance in our India and GAUM businesses which got impacted the most due to the lockdown. In India, the impact was substantial as we typically had very high sales in the two weeks of March since it is the onset of the summer season.

For HI as well, we also saw a significant adverse impact on sales in the later part of March 2020 which marks the onset of high mosquito infestation in north India. Our international business Indonesia continued with its growth momentum with mid single digit profitability and constant currency growth in spite of the Covid-19 crisis driven by consistent performance and several go through market initiatives. In GAUM Godrej Africa, USA and the Middle East, we witnessed a weak performance amidst disruptions caused by Covid-19 in all our countries of operation. 

In this unprecedented quarter, for encouraging, we can share across most categories. In fact, we can share in almost 70% of our portfolio. What we are doing now with approaching the problem is restart, recover and retool our business. So as part of restarting, we are safeguarding lives and livelihoods. We are starting operations wherever possible with the necessary clearances and permissions. We are also supporting our partners a lot. We are among the first FMCG companies to provide the Covid insurance scheme to our entire extended team. Additional allowances, safety kits, documentations to our vendors so that they can operate as essential good manufacturers. We are giving advance payments to few vendors to supply critical materials etc. Supporting our partner in this situation is extremely important. 

At the same time, we have been doing what we call cost management. We have been supporting the community that we mentioned to you. We know that this is ahead of the humanitarian crisis and we have people working from home, setting up connecting engagement and with a lot of care, compassion and communication with our teams. The second part of our approach has been recovery or the bounce back phase where markets are opening up. As lockdowns are easing, we are ramping up operations in both production and distribution. We are also looking at third parties to augment production. We are trying to make it easier for our GTE partners to order.

We are partnering with other companies such as Udan, Swiggy, Zomato, shop kirana, zoom car, etc. The idea is to keep on ramping our operations. What is important right now is improving availability and so we are working very hard to ensure that our products are getting more and more available. This is also a good opportunity to drive market share. In spite of a tough environment, our market shares have been increasing and we too believe there are opportunities to further drive market share. We are tracking IT innovation. You will see a lot more innovations launched by us over the next few weeks.

The channel dynamics are quite different right now. There are different channels that we are employing with each channel requiring a different playbook whether its a kirana store, modern trade, ecommerce, chemist. So a very progressive approach is being employed at the channel level. And then we are planning for different scenarios to prepare for life post lockdown. As part of the retool safe, we recognize that we need to prepare for the new normal. So, we are understanding and analyzing new consumer needs and behaviour, understanding channel ships, looking at a much more flexible and adapted supply chain, trying to forge a much more agile culture, and also embracing digitization in a very big way.

The idea is to be able to use this turbulence and volatility to create more opportunities and definitely emerge stronger. So there are three big areas of focus for us. One is around getting back growth because we recognized that growth has been a challenge for us. Second is to relentlessly execute and the third is to sustain a very high performance and winning culture. The situation will remain challenging. There is no way to accurately predict the coming year. So, we will have to plan for different scenarios, be adaptive and resilient. However, we believe that we are relatively well positioned and our several strengths will hold us during this time. 

Conference Call with Maruti Suzuki Management and Analysts on Q4FY20 and Full Year Earnings Performance and Outlook. Listen in to the full earnings transcript. 

Highlights from Ajay Seth, CFO

Financial year 2019-20 began with considerable challenges with sluggish economic growth in India and worldwide. Weak credit growth and challenges in the financial sector slowed down economic expansion. This slowed down overall demand environment. 

The government of India and RBI took some bold measures, and the economic environment started to show improvement in the latter part of 2019-20. However COVID19 brought the economy to a screeching halt. For the auto sector, all negative factors struck together with full force. We have not witnessed such a huge demand contraction. 

Major factors that affected the sales: increase in selling price due to regulation, increase in insurance premium and taxes, reduced credit availability and increased downpayment requirements. Uncertainties among customers such as anticipation of GST reduction, shifts from BSIV to BSVI, kept customers indecisive. 

At the end of the year COVID19 brought sales to a halt. The company increased efforts to reach out to customers. Targeted digital outreach was kept up. To ensure credit availability, the company tied up with leading commercial banks and rural banks. Maruti tied up with finance companies like Bank of Baroda, Kotak Mahindra, HDFC Finance and so on. 

The company sold 8 lakh BSVI vehicles during the year. The company launched new models to cater to growing interest in the EV space. The shift towards petrol vehicles is more obvious now, with diesel share now falling below 20% market share. Petrol vehicle sales account for 94% of sales in Q4FY20. There is growing interest in CNG vehicles as well. 

The company saw exports decline 6%, exporting 1,200,171 vehicles. Domestic and export together saw volume decline overall of 16.1% in FY20.

Capacity utilization fell much below that of the previous year. Higher sales plus weak utilization together significantly impacted profit margins. The company partially offset this by cost reduction measures. Net sales in FY20 saw a decline of 13.7% over last year. Net profit fell by 24.7% compared to last year. 

In Q4FY20 saw volumes fall by 16%. Net sales fell by 17.1% and net profit fell by 28.1% YoY in this quarter.