These Bluechips Have Lagged Behind Nifty 50 Since Last Ganesh Chaturthi

India’s stock markets remain buoyant on the eve of Ganesh Chaturthi and are trading near record highs. Since the festival last year, benchmark indices have jumped more than 50% and many individual stocks have gained far more.

Also Read: These Nifty 50 stocks have gained the most since last Ganesh Chaturthi

Which stocks did not perform since Ganesh Chaturthi 2020?

Since August 21, 2020, when Ganesh Chaturthi was celebrated last year, the benchmark Nifty 50 index has gained 52.45% from 11,371.6 to 17,342.6. But not all marquee stocks have joined the party with the same gusto and a handful have even been in the red. 

If one looks at the stock price data, as many as 24 counters in the 50-stock index have actually underperformed the index itself. These include top public-sector undertakings, energy companies and automobile manufacturers, all of whom were adversely hit by the back-to-back national and regional lockdowns that badgered the Indian economy throughout last year and during the April-June period this year. 

- Maruti and other laggards

Among these laggards, shareholders of at least three companies — Power Grid Corp of India Ltd, Hero MotoCorp and Maruti Suzuki—have actually seen their investments lose value over this period.
Maruti, India’s biggest carmaker, lost just over 1.1%. Power Grid, the state-run transmission utility, slipped 8.5%. and Hero Motocorp, India’s biggest motorcycle maker, skid 7.77%. 

Other shares in the top 50 have been in the green, but have been outdone by the index by a mile. At least five companies — Britannia, Dr. Reddy’s Labs, Coal India, ITC and NTPC—gained less than 10%, effectively meaning that the index beat them five-fold. 

Incidentally, several companies among the laggards are government-owned. Apart from Power Grid, Coal India and NTPC, refining and oil marketing companies Indian Oil and Bharat Petroleum also lagged behind the index. These two companies registered comparatively modest gains of just 25.89% and 17.52%, respectively. 

- Reliance’s performance

Interestingly, billionaire Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Industries Ltd also underperformed the benchmark index and gained just 17.25% in the period, less than a third of what the Nifty did. 

However, this is mainly because Reliance was first of the mark when the stock market revived after the crash of March 2020. The Reliance stock more than doubled from a low of Rs 875 in March 2020 to cross Rs 2,000 apiece in August 2020, thanks to the conglomerate raising billions of dollars from Facebook, Google and many other foreign investors for its Jio Platforms and Reliance Retail units.