Virendra Verma

Mumbai, April 11: THE falling stock prices of software companies have come as a boon for two Reliance group companies — Reliance Industries (RIL) and Reliance Petroleum (RPL) — who are among the top three list of the most valuable companies based on market capitlisation.

The sharp fall in the stock prices of Infosys Technologies and Wipro on Wednesday changed the market cap ranking of these companies.

Based on the closing prices of Wednesday, Hindustan Lever (HLL) remains the most valuable company followed by RIL and RPL respectively.

With this change, the saying of “old is gold” seems to be coming true in the stock market. Till early last year, new economy sector companies were getting good valuations and the list of most valuable companies was dominated by these companies.

But after one year, the situation has completely changed and again old stalwarts like HL, RIL, RPL and ITC are back among the toppers.

Till last year, Azeem Premji, Narayan Murthy and Subhash Chandra were counted among the richest people in the country and also in Asia. But with the stock market crash, their assets in the form of stakes in their companies have also fallen and their names have disappeared from the list.

Wipro, at one time, used to command the top ranking for the most valuable company with a market cap of over Rs 1,25,000 crore but now this value has come down sharply to just Rs 21,000 crore. Similarly, Infosys Technologies’ market cap has come down from over Rs 60,000 crore to Rs 21,500 crore.

Hindustan Lever is again back at the top of the list as the most valuable company with market cap of around Rs 47,000 crore followed by the bulls’ old favourite Reliance Industries, with value of Rs 34,000 crore.

A year ago, of the top 25 most valuable companies, 40 per cent of the companies were from the new economy or ICE sectors but now except for Infosys, Wipro, HCL Technologies, MTNL and VSNL, other companies are from the old economy. Even in the BSE Sensex and NSE S&P CNX Nifty indices, the weightage is more for the brick and mortar industries.

With this change, analysts feel that the index funds would also see a remarkable shift in their portfolios as the weightage has to be in line with the index.