Amit Kumar Kotak Securities The buy side says: “Incisive and insightful. He understands markets and companies.”
Amit Kumar of Kotak Securities rules the roost. The 30-year-old analyst, who “keeps us up-to-date on what’s next in a volatile sector,” as one client puts it, astutely upgraded Dish TV India from reduce to add in March 2010, at 40.35 rupees, partly on reduced set-top-box and programming prices. When shares of the television services provider — which is based in Nodia and serves markets in Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka — slipped to Rs36.45 two months later, Kumar pounded the table, telling clients that the market was overreacting to disappointing results for the quarter ended March 31. (The company reported a loss of Rs598 million [$13 million] for that quarter.) Good call. The stock ended May 2011 at Rs78.45, for a gain of 94.4 percent since the upgrade — and a whopping 115.2 percent since the reiteration, at a time when the sector slipped 4.2 percent. Kumar earned a master’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi in 2003 and a postgraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore in 2007; that same year he joined Kotak. “Amit is our go-to source,” says another fan.
