Shipping Corp. Shares Jump To The Highest In 10 Years

Shares of Shipping Corporation of India Ltd. surged to their highest in a decade on receiving multiple expressions of interests for its proposed privatisation.

The secretary at the Department of Investment and Public Asset Management, in a post on Twitter, said the transaction will now move to the second stage.

The government is planning to sell its entire 63.75% stake, or 29.69 crore shares, along with the management control, as part of its divestment plan, according to a newspaper advertisement it issued in December 2020. RBSA Capital Advisors LLP was given charge of managing this strategic sale.

The central government, according to Union Budget documents, aims to garner Rs 1.75 lakh crore through divestments in 2021-22. In FY21, it had budgeted to raise Rs 2.1 lakh crore through divestments but fell short.

The company’s former Chairman SC Hajara, in an interaction with BloombergQuint in December 2019, had said the process would not be easy as no other firm across the globe has such a diversified fleet except three Japanese corporations. He, however, had said the entry of a private player may make the acquisition and sale process more efficient. “Particularly for second-hand ships, the process can never be as transparent as a global tender for new bidding,” Hajara, who spent nearly four decades at the Navratna company, had said.

Shares of Shipping Corp. gained as much as 19% in early trade on Tuesday to Rs 123.55 apiece — the highest since Jan. 25, 2011. The stock is trading on volumes that are nearly 13 times higher than its 20-day average. It has now quadrupled from its 52-week low of Rs 31.5 touched on March 24, 2020.

The Relative Strength Index showed that the stock is in ‘overbought’ territory, with a reading of 81. A reading above 70 indicates that the stock is in the ‘overbought’ territory.