Indigenous Investors Weekly Insights!
Top 3 well curated stories from the stable of Indigenous Investors incase you missed them. These can range from finance to sports, depends on what made the headlines. Stay tuned.
This week, we cover the following:
Gensol and the fraud promoter saga
India picks up speed in rooftop solar market
Infosys sets the tone for Indian IT sector with a poor Q4 show
After 2 weeks of constant jitters around tariffs and trade wars, it seems like Indian equity markets have accepted the new world order (as of now).
Here’s how the major indices fared this week. (April 14 to 19, 2025)
If you want us to publish some sector specific indices that you would like to read on a weekly basis, please write to us in the comment below.
So now let’s dive into a story that shook the investors this week.
Story #1: Gensol and the fraud promoter saga (click here)
Jaggi brothers of Gensol Engineering bought a flat in a DLF’s ultra-premium project for Rs 42.94 crores. And they used the money from the company to buy it in their personal name.
This flagged off a lot of folks in the ecosystem. SEBI looked into it and uncovered a fraud that the article covers.
So let’s give you a small playbook of how this happens.
Here’s how frauds work.
The companies start off as legitimate businesses. Overtime, the promoters weave a story around how the company has a cutting edge in technology which gives it some moat over the competitors. In reality, the promoters are merely cutting corners, we will come to that later.
The markets (both private and public) often jump to simple conclusions that we will not miss the boat and start investing like crazy. This often happens when the animal sprits are extremely high, which means the equity markets tend to just go one way.
Look at the chart below from the year 2022.
source: screener.in
It’s a 3 year chart and apparently, as of Thursday, the 3 year return is now negative.
Okay, so coming back to our topic.
Now since it’s a bullish phase of the market raising money is easy. All you need to do is publish some numbers (fake ones) and weave a story around it.
Now remember that these businesses are legitimate ones with inflated numbers. And in a bullish phase it’s easy to miss the sight of what’s happening in the company. Because your portfolio is in the green.
So promoters get even more confident.
Now, they start weaving subsidiaries. They start engaging in related party transactions that gets disclosed at the end of the year.
Now why do they need so many subsidiaries?
To route the money raised from the Government, Banks, selling their shares, etc into their private luxuries of life.
Funds for business are diverted for personal use. The company goes into excessive debt while the promoters live an extravagant life.
This is not the first time and will never be the last. As investors, we should understand the playbook to avoid such disasters.
Now, such incidents only come to light when usually its the banks or the Government losing some money.
Story #2: India picks up speed in rooftop solar market (click here)
When we visit Baroda or Ahmedabad, we see a slew of houses with solar roofs. Some of them are used for providing electricity to the home and excess ones are put into the grid and sold to the Government.
This is just 2 cities we are writing about. But there are many cities that have caught up with the idea of installing solar batteries on their rooftops.
Falling costs of solar pv cells have also enabled a large scale adoption. China has mastered this technology while Indian companies lag behind by a huge margin.
And yet, Government incentives play a huge role in this.
“Interestingly as per the report the PM Surya Ghar Yojana: Energising Residential Rooftop Adoption The PM Surya Ghar: Muft Bijli Yojana, aimed at installing rooftop solar in 1 crore households with subsidies up to Rs 78,000, is expected to provide strong support to residential adoption. The scheme supports low and middleincome households by reducing their electricity bills. It also aims to create nearly 17 lakh jobs, boosting the solar value chain. Recently, rooftop solar initiative achieved a historic milestone with 10 lakh installations as of March 10, 2025.”
Housing societies in Mumbai too are catching up to this. And slowly, this will help reduce the electricity bills.
Story #3: Infosys sets the tone for Indian IT sector with a poor Q4 show (click here)
As per our internal calculations, IT sector used to command somewhere around 17% of Nifty 50 a couple of years back. Now, it’s down to around 10% odd. This is a 17 year low for the sector’s weightage in the index.
The reason for this is a lacklustre performance from the big boys such as TCS, Infosys and Wipro.
In our conversation with other analysts and fund managers, there’s a common consensus that these big boys are too big to turn around. There’s an old adage that says ‘Elephants can’t dance!’
India is still considered to be a low cost IT service provider to the world rather than a serious player in innovation or producing some ground breaking technologies.
While there are many startups claiming to be AI powered. In reality, they are merely using some LLM’s and other AI models to build a product which eventually Google or Microsoft tends to give for free.
In a nutshell, we produce millions of engineers every year but then the quality of their output is just bad.
98 % of educational institutions are doing an extremely poor job at providing skills to these students. That’s why there are no jobs & no innovation.
It’s time, the educational institutions recognise this poor show from the sector and realise that they need to go beyond the call of their duty. Re-skill their own faculty, if needed. But provide our country with better engineers. Those not only use AI tools but build their own.
Just a fun fact - there are around 12,000 data centres in the world. 50% of them are in USA and while in India we barely have 1,200.