Monday morning opened in green for Indian markets, with the Sensex and Nifty posting considerable gains following the right-wing victory in the Maharashtra Assembly elections over the weekend. The Mahayuti coalition won 234 out of 288 seats, with 132 for BJP, 57 for Shinde’s Shiv Sena, and 41 for Ajit Pawar’s NCP, among the prominent parties. In morning trade, both Nifty and Sensex rose at least 1.6 per cent.
Sensex kept itself above the 80,300 level, a welcome relief in the October bear run triggered by the FII selloff. Nifty was back above the 24,000 mark. Both indices had inched to the green on Friday, too, ahead of the poll results.
“Sentiment is expected to remain positive following the BJP-led alliance’s significant victory in the Maharashtra assembly elections, along with a rally in global markets,” said Vikas Jain, research head at Reliance Securities.
Despite Adani stocks falling en masse last week following the US indictment of alleged bribery and fraud regarding solar contracts of Adani Green Energy, all of them traded in the green on Monday morning, except for the news media arm NDTV.
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Over the weekend, Kenya cancelled multimillion-dollar energy deals with the Adani Group, and Bangladesh reportedly began investigating Sheikh Hasina-era bilateral purchase agreements with major conglomerates, including Adani.
The group, led by industrialist Gautam Adani, clarified on Saturday that the group did not enter any binding agreement to operate the Nairobi airport.
Adani Group on Monday also revealed that its profits and cash reserves and profits were enough to handle debt obligations and also service its growth plans in a presentation to investors.
The conglomerate said they had total cash balances of Rs 53,024 crore at September-end. This exceeded the amount needed to service the long-term debt repayments for the upcoming 28 months, they said. Adani Group also talked about its liquidity position, stating, “Adani portfolio companies have sufficient liquidity to cover all debt servicing requirements for at least 12 months.”
Looking further east, China markets opened low on Monday morning, with trade war fears bearing down on the regions. The blue-chip CSI300 index fell to its five-week low, the Shanghai Composite index hit a three-week low, and the Hong Kong markets saw their lowest levels in two months.