Outlook towards India positive compared to its emerging market peers: Marcellus Investment

Dalal Street snapped its 8-day winning streak on Friday, but Sensex and Nifty managed to end in the green for the 5th straight week, despite the fall on Friday.

The Nifty50 ended Friday with a fall of 1.10 percent at 17758.45, while Sensex saw a cut of 1.08 percent and ended at 59646.15.

Speaking to CNBC-TV18, Pramod Gubbi, Co-Founder of Marcellus Investment, said India is increasingly being seen in a more positive light compared to its emerging market peers.

“India is increasingly being seen in a more positive light, partly given what is happening in China. People are concerned about what is happening in China and they are looking for alternatives. However there are very few alternatives within the emerging markets that can offer this sort of capital deployment opportunity," he said.

Gubbi added that India has also done well in terms of keeping the economic conditions in good shape despite the headwinds that we have had to face. "Banking system is in good order, we have seen credit growth coming back after a long time, earnings season hasn’t been that bad and we have dealt with inflation better than a lot of other countries. So a lot of boxes are being ticked for India when some of the emerging market peers are not doing great for themselves," he added.

“We have been quite positive on the financial services sector. We reckon there are couple of structural tailwinds for the sector. One is the financialisation of household savings in the country. Despite global interest rates going up, India’s mortgage rates are pretty sensible. So there is structural reduction in cost of capital in India and a lot of that has to do with the financialisation of household savings," Gubbi said.

He added that a country, which historically has been enthralled by real estate and gold as asset classes, has seen almost a decade of pretty healthy flows into bank deposits, mutual funds, etc, so that is a big structural tailwind that is likely to last for multiple decades. "So this puts the financial services space on a structural growth path for the next couple of decades at least,” he said.