The 2013 All-India Research Team: Telecommunications, First: Rohit Chordia

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Rohit Chordia
Kotak Securities

First-place appearances: 1

Total appearances: 3

Analyst debut: 2011

Rohit Chordia captures the crown for the first time, rising one rung after two years in second place. He is considered a “cerebral analyst” by one portfolio manager who also commends the Kotak Securities researcher for his “excellent bottom-up and top-down views.” Chordia, 33, believes that the medium-term prospects for the sector are bright because the wireless industry, he says, “has just come out of a long, hypercompetition-led cyclical downturn — and I would expect the upturn to sustain for a while.” None of the challengers has achieved sufficient scale to become profitable, he notes. Moreover, an increasingly favorable regulatory environment as well as wireless data growth, thanks to an inferior wireline infrastructure, will drive expansion. The sector outperformed the S&P BSE Sensex Index by 30.7 percentage points this year through October, jumping 36.5 percent. Chordia’s advice to investors is to overweight the group via two mobile-services providers, New Delhi–based Bharti Airtel and Mumbai’s Idea Cellular. Both companies benefit from the improved competitive dynamics in the wireless segment, but Idea enjoys the additional advantages of focusing solely on India and maintaining a “healthier balance sheet, superior execution at the margin and scope for further market-share gains,” he says. Chordia joined Kotak in 2006 and worked before that in Minneapolis as an analyst on the internal competitive intelligence and M&A team at Ameriprise Financial. He earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering with honors from the Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani, and a postgraduate diploma in management with a major in finance from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta. Chordia “understands the sector better than most analysts,” cheers another backer. — Carolyn Koo

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