Promoter and MD continues to trim his holding.

source: BSE | Inside Trading Disclosures

HEG Q3 FY24 concall Highlights

No growth in steel production worldwide
a. US is flat
b. EU has degrown by 7%
c. CN has subdued demand + excess inventory has been exported
d. currently electric arc furnace – upcoming capacity of 90 million tons, by 2025 40 Million tons of additional capacity will come online. Rest post 2025. Decarbonization of steel is a one way process.
Though margin pressure is going on, HEG has operated at 85% capacity for last 9 months on the 80000 ton capacity plant
Margin looks bad due to delay in passing price drop in needle coke. Usually takes at least a quarter. However margin pressure will remain subdued for the next 3 quarters
There is no inventory overhang and it is at stable level. So risk of an inventory right off is relatively low as per management.
HEG has the highest utilization in the electrode space~ 85%
getting subsidy on electricity from MP at a discount of 50 paisa. They expect the power cost to remain at 5.5 rupees per unit but this can go down to 4 as they are also looking out to buy renewables.

TACC – Construction has started and will get operational by June / July 2023
the major step is the process of making anode powder where HEG has experience from past . They will use the old furnaces to graphitize.
the next of the steps to create anode powder is mostly done by machines

TACC has been procuring 10 ton per month and evaluation with customers . They can see 50-60 GWh capacity being materialized in India.
competition (himadri etc. ) has not announced any capex in anode powder space.

they have indicated that they have the necessary expertise to produce anode powder. ( Which seems legit from my point of view )

Competition
industry is going through a lot of pain HEG is holding up

1. Graftec has shut down 25000 ton capacity and has been reporting losses – https://ir.graftech.com/investors/news/news-details/2024/GrafTech-Reports-Fourth-Quarter-and-Full-Year-2023-Results/default.aspx

2. Graphite India numbers are very poor and have been writing off inventory

   

@vkediaonline Actually it is not a big effort once you know which stocks have undergone Corporate action. Once you have this info, modifying the sheet is very easy. The difficulty is in knowing which ones are changing. If the stocks that are seeing corporate action are part of the pf, we can catch it very easily. Otherwise, it is very difficult. We could end up with some stocks not finding a place in the portfolio due to this reason also.
You could get clean data from some sources; but this will mean money to be paid for this. This is not a commercial venture for me and hence, I am happy with me doing the work.

On variations, I think I have mentioned it previously. The few things I was considering
a. Add a 3 month look back period also and find the composite rank considering 3, 6m and 12m scores.
b. Changing the weightage between 6m and 12m. Currently, I am doing 50:50. This could be changed to 60:40 or 75:25 etc to give more weightage to recent price action. However, this requires lot of simulation effort to see if this makes any difference in the pf. I do not have that much resource. I might do this sometime in the future.

@Ascendant Anant Raj is not part of the Smallcap 250 index; it is part of the Microcap 250 index. In fact, I am doing a pf using Microcap 250 index also. Anant Raj is part of that portfolio. It is ranked 10th in my working sheet among the 250 stocks. I have had a good run in that stock till now.