Patni fundamentally very weak: Girish Pai, Centrum Broking

Girish Pai, Head Of Research, Centrum Broking, in a chat with ET now talks about the IT space.

Given the performance of the IT lot, do you think there will be some amount of churning in the portfolio in the IT portfolio of most institutions?

I am not sure what the fund manager is going to do. But within the recommendations we have made, we would suggest that if you want to be in IT sector, move away from TCS, Wipro and even Patni. Patni is the other stock that I would want to talk about which we are significantly negative on while the other 3-4 stocks that we have are more fully valued rather than being having very large downside.

Patni right now is a play on possible M&A move otherwise the business is fundamentally very weak and the stock should move down on a fundamental basis. The advice I would give to fund manager is to shift out of TCS and Wipro and Patni back into what I think a slightly better stocks which are Infosys, HCL Tech to some extent MphasiS that is the way I would put it.

So these are two areas which are long term - 1-2 years plays rather than next quarter plays. That is the way I would look at it.