Spend More, Grow Rich

Why CapEx matters and how to locate companies that will create wealth

- Karthik Anand Vijay & Udhayaprakash

In her Union Budget for FY24, the finance minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, raised the target for the government capital expenditure (capex) by 37.4 per cent to ₹10 lakh crore. She added, “Investments in infrastructure and productive capacity have a large multiplier impact on growth and employment. After the subdued period of the pandemic, private investments are growing again. The Budget takes the lead once again to ramp up the virtuous cycle of investment and job creation.”

No doubt capex is directly linked to growth. A company that takes on capex is gearing itself for growth. Taking cue from this, we sought to find companies that have taken significant capex between April 2020 and September 2023, i.e., FY21 to the first half of FY23. This period saw the outbreak of the pandemic and then a sharp recovery, so it covered both a period of slump and boom. To ensure quality, we applied some other filters too, which are discussed later. This exercise eventually gave us a list of companies.

In the second part of this story, we have discussed the 10 largest companies by market size in the list obtained. These profiles will help you assess the opportunity and understand the outlook of the most prominent names in the list. But first, let’s delve into the dynamics of capex to understand this aspect.

Your capex cheat sheet

Understanding capital expenditure and finding out when it’s good and when it’s not