For Automotive Stampings and Assemblies Limited’s (NSEI:ASAL) shareholders, and also potential investors in the stock, understanding how the stock’s risk and return characteristics can impact your portfolio is important. The beta measures ASAL’s exposure to the wider market risk, which reflects changes in economic and political factors. Not every stock is exposed to the same level of market risk, and the market as a whole represents a beta value of one. A stock with a beta greater than one is expected to exhibit higher volatility resulting from market-wide shocks compared to one with a beta below one.

See our latest analysis for Automotive Stampings and Assemblies

What is ASAL’s market risk?

Automotive Stampings and Assemblies’s beta of 0.86 indicates that the company is less volatile relative to the diversified market portfolio. The stock will exhibit muted movements in both the downside and upside, in response to changing economic conditions, whereas the general market may move by a lot more. ASAL’s beta indicates it is a stock that investors may find valuable if they want to reduce the overall market risk exposure of their stock portfolio.

Does ASAL’s size and industry impact the expected beta?

With a market cap of ₹1.29B, ASAL falls within the small-cap spectrum of stocks, which are found to experience higher relative risk compared to larger companies. Moreover, ASAL’s industry, auto components, is considered to be cyclical, which means it is more volatile than the market over the economic cycle. Therefore, investors may expect high beta associated with small companies, as well as those operating in the auto components industry, relative to those more well-established firms in a more defensive industry. This is an interesting conclusion, since both ASAL’s size and industry indicates the stock should have a higher beta than it currently has. There may be a more fundamental driver which can explain this inconsistency, which we will examine below.

How ASAL’s assets could affect its beta

During times of economic downturn, low demand may cause companies to readjust production of their goods and services. It is more difficult for companies to lower their cost, if the majority of these costs are generated by fixed assets. Therefore, this is a type of risk which is associated with higher beta. I examine ASAL’s ratio of fixed assets to total assets to see whether the company is highly exposed to the risk of this type of constraint. ASAL’s fixed assets to total assets ratio of higher than 30% shows that the company uses up a big chunk of its capital on assets that are hard to scale up or down in short notice. As a result, this aspect of ASAL indicates a higher beta than a similar size company with a lower portion of fixed assets on their balance sheet. This outcome contradicts ASAL’s current beta value which indicates a below-average volatility.

What this means for you:

ASAL may be a worthwhile stock to hold onto in order to cushion the impact of a downturn. Depending on the composition of your portfolio, low-beta stocks such as ASAL is valuable to lower your risk of market exposure, in particular, during times of economic decline. What I have not mentioned in my article here are important company-specific fundamentals such as Automotive Stampings and Assemblies’s financial health and performance track record. I highly recommend you to complete your research by taking a look at the following:

1. Financial Health: Is ASAL’s operations financially sustainable? Balance sheets can be hard to analyze, which is why we’ve done it for you. Check out our financial health checks here.

2. Past Track Record: Has ASAL been consistently performing well irrespective of the ups and downs in the market? Go into more detail in the past performance analysis and take a look at the free visual representations of ASAL’s historicals for more clarity.

3. Other High-Performing Stocks: Are there other stocks that provide better prospects with proven track records? Explore our free list of these great stocks here.

To help readers see pass the short term volatility of the financial market, we aim to bring you a long-term focused research analysis purely driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis does not factor in the latest price sensitive company announcements.

The author is an independent contributor and at the time of publication had no position in the stocks mentioned.