The small investor's inclination to come back to stock markets, thanks mostly to the government's thrust on the software industry, even the second rung scrips of city based software companies have come to HSE's rescue.

While scrips like Satyam and Visual Soft have been highly fancied on other bourses like BSE and NSE, other scrips of Hyderabad based companies like VJIL Conslutants, Ram Info and a few others have caught the fancy of the Hyderabadi investors. Although most of these scrips were relatively unknown for quite some time, over the last fortnight these counters have seen active trading on HSE with their share prices hitting upper end of the circuit filter almost every trading day.

HSE stock brokers say that the software scrips have higher potential to inprovethe prices further as present industry price earnings ratio is ruling at 40, while the second line software stock are still lagging at a price earning of 12.

While the share price of VJIL Consulting has zoomed by 102 per cent within the last 15 days, from Rs 18.50 to Rs 37.50, Ram Info share price has increased by 58 per cent from Rs 17.90 to Rs 28.35 in the same period. Despite the industry fancy attached to software scrips these days, the market players at HSE say that these companies are proposing expansion and their export markets are growing in a big way during the year.

This apart, the two other software scrips, Frontier Info and Info Enter, have also been making their presence felt on the bourse. While the Frontier scrip has rose by 98 per cent Info Enter scrip scrolled by 3 per cent in the fortnight under review.

Speaking to The Financial Express, P S Venkateswaran of Ram Informatics Ltd (RIL) said that the company is negotiating with the $ 5 million US software consulting company basedat Connecticut. After the tie-up with the US based company, Ram Information will be in a position to market the services at USA. At present, the company is engaged in the software development project worth Rs 5 crore, he added.

Further, during the year Ram Info is planning an expansion programme at a cost of Rs 7 crore by way of expanding the centres of training division and to set up a marketing office at US.

For the first quarter ending June 1998, RIL has posted an operating income of Rs 91.31 lakh and a net profit of Rs 12.48 lakh. As per the projections the company expects to make a turnover of Rs 5.50 crore during the current year. During 1997-98, Ram Info had recorded a total sales figure of Rs 3.14 crore and a net profit of Rs 44.75 lakh.

M Satish of VJIL Consulting has confirmed that the company has on-hand development works valued at Rs 9 crore and another Rs 3 crore orders are awaited for final nod. As part of the expansion programme VJIL proposed to increase their operations base at US byopening two more offices there, he said. In the just concluded first quarter VJIL has posted a sales figure of Rs 1.64 crore and a net profit of Rs 42 lakh against a net profit of Rs 1.18 crore for the full year.