In today’s article I will share ways to get hold of earnings call transcripts for Indian stocks. They are important if you want to understand the business, including operations and financials.
What are earnings calls?
Profit and loss are announced with every quarterly result update. In half yearly results balance sheet data is also disclosed in addition to profit and loss statements.
In earnings calls, management of a company gets into a conference call. First the management shares its view on the quarter that went by and the developments in the company. This can include the following,
- Sales, operating profit and net profit growth
- Cash flows
- Cash balances
- Debt levels
- Fund-raising plans
- How different business segments have fared
- Investments into new businesses
- Plans for business expansion
- Competition
After the management speaks, the floor is thrown open for analysts from broking houses and investment managers like mutual funds AMCs, insurance company AMCs and FII advisors to ask questions to the management. Even retail investors participate in these calls.
Management including the CEO, CFO or Business Heads answer the analyst questions.
Usually, these calls take an hour from start to end.
Why should you track earnings calls?
This is how you understand the business behind a stock. What better than to hear from the management. How they answer questions tells you a lot about how forthright they are in sharing details. It is easy to talk about your strong points. It is not as easy to discuss business problems and management mistakes.
A good management will not hide. They will take criticism and sharp questions and give transparent answers.
This tells you a lot about the quality of the management which is a very important factor in fundamental analysis based stock investing.
Where can I get earnings call transcripts for Indian stocks?
Company websites
Most companies in India unfortunately do not bother with sharing transcripts of earning calls.
A few who do like Godrej Industries, Mahindra Satyam or Piramal Enterprises are the exception rather than the norm.
Researchbytes.com
I use this free service myself. Researchbytes looks at Indian stocks and collects various material linked to a stock including company announcements, investor presentations, and earnings calls.
You need to sign up and create an account to access the same.
Visit Researchbytes.com.
You will get a lot of transcripts for earnings calls of companies, which you will not find otherwise on the respective company websites. This is because these are privately shared with broking houses analysts, fund managers and fund analysts. Researchbytes is gathering a lot of the hitherto private data and sharing it with the broader investor community.
If you know of other sources for earning calls do let me know so I can share it the Capital Orbit community.
Kunal Kher says
Conference call transcripts serve as really valuable qualitative information.I remember reading a Castrol Conference call transcript in which Management said that efficient vehicles were reducing the frequency of Lubrication Application and how sales volume was growing low.I Sold the stock after that information.
Reputed companies will have the transcripts of conference calls available by a simple Google search in the form of a PDF file.
Edcole says
I dont know about Indian companies… but for US you will get it fast and accurate here http://www.earningsimpact.com
May be you can ask them to cover Indian calls…
sarita says
kunal, i have been trying to access a call transcript on researchbytes after logging in with facebook, it’s not sending the otp … and since it’s stuck on that i cannot even trying to register … any ideas?