Positive on consumption theme, agri sector: Prateek Agarwal

In a chat with ET Now, Prateek Agarwal, CIO, ASK Investment Managers, shares his views on consumption stocks.



ET Now: Markets insiders are telling me that you are extremely hot on agri as a theme. Now the world has been bullish on agri as a theme, but none of the agri stocks and none of the agri companies are going, just a handful of them I can think of and those handful companies have plenty of headwinds.

Prateek Agarwal: Extremely hot is a wrong word to use, but yes we have some exposure to the agri theme. Frankly if you look at the market, we are more positive on the consumption theme and our sense is that consumption oriented towards rural India will probably tend to do better than consumption oriented towards urban areas.

So yes we have some exposure to FMCG. We have some exposure to agri businesses, seed companies and multinational crop protection companies.

Our sense is if economy strengthens, rupee strengthens as a consequence of that, then lot of these businesses which are import dependent may actually see margins improve going forward. So, we have some good names there, high quality businesses where valuations are not stretched. We believe they may just deliver good value to our investors.