• Solara Active Pharma Sciences: This active pharmaceutical ingredients maker’s five promoter entities together pledged nearly 3.84% of their stake in the company. The close to one-third loss in its market value over the past six months probably led one of the promoter entities--Chayadeep Properties--to provide additional security to lender Bajaj Finance Securities. Other promoter entities that pledged shares to raise loans are Pronomz Ventures LLP, Karuna Ventures, Karun Business Solutions LLP, Agnus Holdings and Chayadeep Properties. The company is currently in the process of completing its merger with Aurore Life Sciences, Hydra Active Pharma Sciences and Empyrean Lifesciences 

• Manappuram Finance: Brokerages recently upgraded their rating for this stock to ‘Buy’ from ‘Hold’ as valuations are looking good for this NBFC company. Manappuram’s main product portfolio of gold loans saw a sharp rebound in Q2FY22, after continuously declining in Q4FY21 and Q1FY22. The jump is attributed to the high ticket size of gold loans. Total AUM for the company grew at 14.8% QoQ and gold loans paced up by 13.2% QoQ.  Asset quality improved as gross NPAs of gold loans reduced to 1.6% from 2% QoQ.

Despite the upturn in loans, net profit declined 15% QoQ because of a decrease in net yields. The management expects yields to further decline in Q3FY22, temporarily, before it stabilizes. Overall, analysts like Axis Securities and BNP Paribas, have a positive outlook for this stock as the company is in a comfortable liquidity situation and gold loans are expected to rise 10-15% in FY22. 

• ICICI Bank: India’s leading private bank, ICICI Bank, recently held an analyst day event in order to showcase its digital offerings for the retail and corporate customers. Post this event, analysts are upbeat on the prospects of the private lender and expect of upto 52% upside in its stock price over the next one year, with an average upside of a little over 11.57%.

ICICI Bank's collaboration with Amazon Pay was fruitful with more than two million co-branded credit cards being issued in the last three years. ICICI Bank expanded its market share in credit card issuances by 200 bps between October 2020 and October 2021, and by 800 bps in terms of the credit card spends. The banks’ monthly UPI transactions have grown at 89% YoY in October 2021. Analysts expect the bank’s earnings to grow at a CAGR of 20%+ between FY22E-FY24E and ROE to improve to 15% by FY23 due to double-digit growth in its loan book, gains in market share across segments and tech initiatives.

• Vodafone Idea: This telecom company saw an incredible up move over the past few weeks, leading to its stock tripling over the past year, and touched a 52-week high Thursday. This stock is also one of the most  overbought stocks on technical indicators RSI and MFI. It was one of the highest gainers on Thursday. Its over 50% spike over the past six trading sessions pushed the company’s stock above all its simple moving averages.

• Brightcom Group: This company recently announced a merger deal which saw its stock rise over 22% in a week. As part of the deal, the company will acquire Vuchi Media, which operates under the brand name MediaMint, for Rs 566 crore. This will include paying the shareholder of Vuchi Rs 360 crore in cash at closing, Rs 170 crore in Brighcom Group shares, and another Rs 36 crore cash six months after closing the deal. The company’s TTM revenues were Rs 3,354.5 crore and a TTM net profit of Rs 596.3 crore. It generated a negative operating cash flows of nearly Rs 252 crore. The company’s cash equivalents as on September 30, 2021 was just Rs 37.21 crore. It will be interesting to see how Brightcom Group manages to fund this deal.