Glossary

The economic entity you own a share of. Use this for almost every purpose.

The most useful document most Indian investors have never opened. It finds the folios you forgot.

Always use these. Standalone accounts hide the debt and losses sitting in subsidiaries.

India has no combined national print. Each exchange broadcasts its own trades, so the volume figure you read belongs to one venue rather than to the market.

Revenue leaves and so do the borrowings, which reads as deleveraging with no repayment. It also happens when a subsidiary enters insolvency and a resolution professional displaces its board.

The right denominator for book value per share, and for a return on equity whose numerator is profit attributable to owners. Mixing the two levels gives the flattering answer wherever the non-controlling share of profit is positive, and the pessimistic one where the partly owned subsidiary is losing money.

Credit for tax deducted exists only once the deductor has both deposited it and filed a return quoting your PAN correctly. Check this rather than the deductor’s word before filing.

Growth that was bought rather than grown, at a price the revenue line never mentions. A mid-year acquisition flatters two consecutive years, and then stops.

A subsidiary large enough that it cannot be governed entirely out of sight. The threshold has been tightened over the years, so read the current definition rather than a remembered one.

The Ind AS name for what older accounts called minority interest, and it has two halves. Ignore the profit half and earnings per share is overstated; ignore the equity half and book value per share is.

The like-for-like number. A company reporting 18% having bought a third of the increase did not grow 18%.

The numerator of earnings per share, by definition. Consolidated profit before the split contains money belonging to the shareholders of a subsidiary, and dividing that by the parent’s share count is how a 33-times stock gets quoted at 21.

The statement of subsidiaries names exactly which one is losing money.

Same role as CDSL. Which one holds your account depends on your broker, and both issue a consolidated statement.

Where an unlisted subsidiary’s own accounts live. The consolidated statement gives you one line; the registrar gives you that entity’s full balance sheet.

Consolidated numbers average a great business with a poor one. This note separates them.

The middle of the three treatments. Below it a stake is carried at a value; above it, at control, the whole investee is consolidated. Here you get one line of profit and nothing else.

Consolidated accounts add its cash and its debt to everybody else’s. Whether either can actually move depends on the documents behind it rather than on the group’s totals.

It shows as a large and growing gap between standalone and consolidated profit. A parent that looks healthy alone and weak consolidated is telling you where to look.

It changes reported consolidated numbers without anything operational happening.

Consolidated cash flow says what the group earned. Upstreaming is what it takes to get any of it to the entity whose shares are listed, and each route carries a different cost and a different set of permissions.