While Reliance Industries, the Nifty 50 heavyweight lost steam in the recent days, Garre sees rival telecom Bharti Airtel posting strong revival signs as their average revenue per shares (ARPU) increase. Cracks have begun to develop in Reliance Jio Infocomm as data points to slip in trade. Garre believes that the combined sector-to-sector performance will aid in the quick performance of the Nifty index rather than relying on the singular blue-chip stock.
As companies pour in solid quarterly earnings, Bernstein rejigs their portfolio more towards recovery themes this year. Garre says, The stocks and sectors that underperformed back in 2020 are new opportunities in 2021. The flavour of the portfolio now aligns more to sectors signalling strong recoveries like construction, infrastructure, financials, and urban plays like PVR. Garre anticipates end markets to perform well as we head to 2021.
Nevertheless, Jio s payments bank, which debuted as the telco s answer to Airtel Payments Bank and Paytm Payments Bank, has itself not yet made significant progress in the country s payments market. It was incorporated as a joint venture between Reliance Industries and public sector bank State Bank of India (SBI) in November 2016 and started its operations in April 2018.
According to the data available on the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) website, Jio Payments Bank has only take a small share of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions. The payments bank processed over 4.2 lakh transactions that accounted for a total of Rs. 20.35 crores in November, as per the publicly available data.