Goldman Sachs highlighted that cargo volumes in May 2026 rose 16% year-on-year to 48.3 million tonnes, led by a 33% increase in liquid cargo and a 17% rise in container volumes. Quarter-to-date cargo volumes stood at 91.4 million tonnes, up 15% from a year ago and ahead of analyst expectations.

Goldman Sachs noted that thermal coal volumes are witnessing a recovery and are likely to remain robust during the summer months. However, logistics rail volumes in May declined 19% year-on-year to 48,170 container units.

The brokerage identified key growth drivers as higher Tata Power-linked coal volumes at Mundra, the ramp-up of operations at the Vizhinjam transhipment hub, growth in liquid cargo at Mundra, and expansion of multimodal logistics parks.

Reflecting the strong volume momentum and improving return on capital employed (ROCE), Goldman Sachs has revised its earnings estimates upward and increased its target price for the stock.

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Adani Ports Q4 snapshot

Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone (APSEZ) reported a consolidated net profit of Rs 3,329 crore for the March-ended quarter, compared to Rs 3,014 crore in the year-ago period, marking a 10% increase. The profit after tax (PAT) is attributable to equity holders of the parent.
India’s largest port operator posted revenue growth of 26% year-on-year (YoY) to Rs 10,737 crore in Q4FY26, as against Rs 8,488 crore posted by the company in the corresponding quarter of the previous financial year.
The company’s Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortisation (EBITDA) in the quarter under review stood at Rs 6,02 crore, up 20% from Rs 5,006 crore reported in Q4FY25.

Also read: Rajesh Exports shares hit 5% lower circuit for 2nd day; firm cites ‘communication gap’ after Sebi order

For the full financial year, PAT jumped 16% to Rs 12,782 crore compared to Rs 11,061 crore in FY25, while the topline stood at Rs 38,736 crore for FY26 versus Rs 31,079 crore in FY25, recording a 25% growth. EBITDA saw a 20% YoY uptick at Rs 22,851 crore.

(Disclaimer: Recommendations, suggestions, views and opinions given by the experts are their own. These do not represent the views of The Economic Times)

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Analyst’s Disclosure: I/we have no stock, option or similar derivative position in any of the companies mentioned, and no plans to initiate any such positions within the next 72 hours. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.

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The word “supercycle” is rarely used with precision. Economists employ it to describe periods when commodity prices, investment flows, and capital-formation rates all move together, in the same direction, for a decade or more — driven not by a single trigger but by an irreversible structural shift in how the world organises production. The last one, centred on China’s entry into the global economy, ran roughly from 1999 to 2014. A new one is now beginning, and once again Asia is its engine room.

This time the forces at work are different in character — and arguably more durable. The previous supercycle was propelled by urbanisation and export-led manufacturing. The one now emerging is propelled by four concurrent waves of capital expenditure: artificial intelligence infrastructure, energy transition and security, defence rearmament, and the re-shoring and diversification of industrial supply chains. Each wave would be significant on its own. Together, they are mutually reinforcing in ways that make the cycle self-sustaining.

What Makes a Supercycle?

Most economic expansions are cyclical: a period of growth, followed by contraction, driven by the ebb and flow of credit, sentiment, and inventory. A supercycle is structurally different. It is anchored by a step-change in the underlying organisation of the economy — a change that takes fifteen to twenty years to fully express itself, during which demand for capital goods, raw materials, skilled labour, and infrastructure remains structurally elevated.

Historical precedent
The last commodity supercycle (1999–2014) saw iron ore prices rise 800% and copper prices quadruple, driven almost entirely by Chinese industrialisation. The current cycle is likely to see similar price behaviour in copper, rare earths, and uranium.

The Industrial Revolution was a supercycle. So was America’s post-war economic build-out. The Japanese miracle of the 1960s and 1970s. China’s accession to the WTO. Each of these was characterised not by boom-and-bust but by a sustained, decade-long reallocation of capital toward production — physical assets that generate returns over long periods and create demand for more of the same.

The conditions for a new supercycle have been accumulating for several years. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the fragility of hyper-concentrated supply chains. The war in Ukraine made energy security a first-order strategic priority. The emergence of large language models created a demand for computing infrastructure on a scale that has no historical parallel. And across Asia, a set of governments decided — almost simultaneously — that the era of passive participation in the global economic order was over.

Asia’s Structural Advantage

The manufacturing base

Asia already produces roughly 60 percent of global manufactured output. It is home to the world’s most sophisticated electronics ecosystems (Taiwan, South Korea, Japan), the world’s largest and most rapidly automating factory floor (China), and a rapidly expanding second tier of lower-cost industrial bases (Vietnam, India, Indonesia, Malaysia). This is not merely a cost advantage — it is a capabilities advantage, one that takes decades to build and cannot be replicated quickly elsewhere.

“The west spent thirty years offshoring its industrial commons. It will take thirty years to rebuild it — during which time Asia will have moved two technological generations ahead.”

— Kenji Watanabe, former METI Director-General

Capital formation rates

Asian economies invest a far higher share of GDP in fixed capital than their Western counterparts. China’s gross fixed capital formation runs at approximately 43 percent of GDP. India’s is around 31 percent. South Korea’s is 30 percent. By comparison, the United States invests roughly 21 percent and the United Kingdom a mere 17 percent. These are not short-term fluctuations — they reflect deep cultural and institutional dispositions toward investment over consumption, toward building infrastructure rather than buying services.

Government coordination capacity

Perhaps the least-appreciated advantage is the capacity of Asian governments to coordinate large-scale industrial policy. Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has orchestrated the country’s semiconductor resurgence through the RAPIDUS programme and its partnership with TSMC at Kumamoto. South Korea’s government has pledged over 550 trillion won in support for its semiconductor and battery industries through 2030. India’s Production Linked Incentive scheme has attracted over $40 billion in manufacturing commitments. China’s state-directed investment machine, for all its inefficiencies, continues to move capital at a speed and scale that democratic market economies struggle to match.

The Four Pillars of the Cycle

The supercycle that is now underway rests on four distinct but interconnected pillars of capital expenditure. It is important to understand each on its own terms — because each has its own investment logic, its own timeline, and its own geography — but equally important to understand them as a system, because their interactions are what give the cycle its extraordinary duration and scale.

Pillar one: AI infrastructure

The artificial intelligence revolution is, at its core, an infrastructure story. Training and running large AI models requires vast quantities of specialised chips, enormous amounts of electricity, sophisticated cooling systems, and reliable high-speed network connectivity. Every one of these requirements drives capital expenditure in sectors that are disproportionately concentrated in Asia.

TSMC alone manufactures roughly 92 percent of the world’s most advanced logic chips. Samsung and SK Hynix together produce the majority of the world’s high-bandwidth memory — the component most constrained in AI server builds. Japan’s Shin-Etsu Chemical and SUMCO supply the silicon wafers on which the world’s most sophisticated chips are built. The AI boom is a geographically concentrated demand signal, and the geography it points to is overwhelmingly Asian.

Pillar two: Energy transition and security

Asia accounts for two-thirds of global electricity consumption growth and is simultaneously the world’s largest producer of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and electric vehicles. The energy transition is not happening to Asia — Asia is building the energy transition for the rest of the world, while simultaneously undergoing its own. Japan is reviving its nuclear sector. South Korea is building the world’s largest offshore wind farms. India is installing solar capacity at a pace that defies conventional forecasting. Every megawatt of new renewable capacity requires copper wiring, steel towers, rare-earth magnets, and semiconductor-controlled inverters — all of which feed demand back through the same Asian industrial base.

Pillar three: Defence rearmament

The geopolitical tensions of the 2020s have triggered a rearmament cycle that is, by some measures, the most broad-based since the Cold War. Japan has doubled its defence budget to two percent of GDP and is rebuilding its shipbuilding, aerospace, and missile industries after decades of deliberate demilitarisation. South Korea is now one of the world’s largest arms exporters. Australia is investing in nuclear-powered submarines. India is pursuing strategic autonomy in defence technology with an urgency it has never previously demonstrated. Even countries as historically pacific as the Philippines and Vietnam are significantly expanding their military procurement. The domestic defence industrial base required to sustain these ambitions — shipyards, electronics manufacturers, propulsion systems — is entirely capital-intensive.

Pillar four: Supply chain re-architecture

The post-pandemic realignment of global supply chains is creating massive greenfield investment opportunities across South and Southeast Asia. Apple now assembles a meaningful portion of its products in India and Vietnam. Samsung has shifted significant production to Vietnam and is expanding in India. Intel, TSMC, and Texas Instruments are all building new fabs in markets they would have dismissed as too risky a decade ago. This is not a marginal reshuffling — it is a fundamental redesign of the geography of global production, and it requires the construction of entirely new industrial ecosystems: factories, ports, power grids, roads, logistics hubs, worker housing.

Why Now? The Convergence Moment

Supercycles do not begin because analysts predict them. They begin because a set of structural forces reaches a threshold at which capital allocation becomes, in effect, compulsory. Companies and governments that fail to invest in the new paradigm find themselves competitively disadvantaged within a single product cycle. This is the moment Asia has now reached.

The AI compute shortage is so acute that hyperscalers — Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta — are signing long-term supply contracts with Asian chip manufacturers that extend years into the future, regardless of near-term demand fluctuations. The energy security imperative is so pressing, following Russia’s weaponisation of gas supplies, that no government with access to renewables manufacturing capacity is choosing not to deploy it. The defence rearmament cycle is locked in by geopolitical forces that show no sign of reversing. And the supply chain diversification imperative has been institutionalised by legislation in the United States, the European Union, Japan, and a dozen other jurisdictions.

Each of these forces is self-reinforcing. AI infrastructure requires energy, which drives energy capex. Defence systems require advanced electronics, which drives semiconductor capex. Re-shored factories require logistics infrastructure, which drives construction capex. The cycle feeds itself.

“We are not in a normal capex cycle. We are in a structural reconfiguration of the global economy. The companies and countries that build now will own the next twenty years.”

— Rashida Nakamura, Chief Economist, Asian Development Bank

The Investment Implication

For investors, the supercycle thesis has a clear implication: the period of elevated capital expenditure is only beginning, and the beneficiaries are disproportionately concentrated in Asia. The companies that supply the inputs to this capex — semiconductor manufacturers, energy equipment producers, industrial machinery makers, defence contractors, construction firms — are in the early stages of a decade-long demand supercycle.

This does not mean the path will be smooth. Every supercycle contains within it episodes of over-investment, inventory correction, and political disruption. The AI capex boom, in particular, is vulnerable to periodic corrections as hyperscalers digest the infrastructure they have built. Geopolitical escalation remains the great wildcard: a conflict over Taiwan, however unlikely, would not merely disrupt the supercycle — it would rewrite it entirely.

But the structural forces are too large, too deeply embedded, and too mutually reinforcing to be undone by normal cyclical fluctuations. Asia has decided to build. The only question for investors is where, specifically, that building will create the most durable value — a question we turn to in the articles that follow.

The figures cited in this article represent analyst consensus estimates as of Q1 2026 and are subject to revision. This article is the first in a three-part series examining Asia’s industrial supercycle.

Foreign portfolio investors (FPI) sold shares worth ₹5,181 crore from the sector in the period, significantly lower than the outflow of ₹17,000 crore in first half of the month, according to the data from NSDL. Between January and March, global investors pulled out shares worth over ₹60,000 crore from the sector.

“Banking stocks offered foreign investors an easy exit from India by virtue of being highly liquid,” said U R Bhat, co-founder & director, Alphaniti. “Despite the sell-off, the sector has fared well, barring a few specific exceptions. Now investors are reducing exposure in other sectors.”

Bank Nifty fell 1% over the past one month compared with a 2.9% drop in the benchmark Nifty 50.

“Global investors toned down the selling in the banking and financial services sector and bought selectively- mostly smaller banks instead of the large caps which is why the pace of outflows moderated,” said Sonam Srivastava, founder and CEO, Wright Research. Overseas investors sold shares worth ₹14,621 crore across 13 sectors in the second half of May, after withdrawing ₹38,443 crore across 19 sectors in the first half of the month.

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Agencies

Mood Shift: Sharply cut pullouts from fin services in May 2nd half, with some buying in small banks

FPIs have continued the selling spree in the current calendar year, offloading equities worth ₹2.6 lakh crore up till June 03. This exceeds their outflow of ₹1.7 lakh crore in the whole of 2025. A sustained selling pressure has intensified this year due to AI disruption and inflationary pressure on account of elevated oil prices given the US-Iran war. In addition, the net outflow of ₹1.3 lakh crore in FY27 so far exceeds the net investment of ₹84,132 crore by FPIs since FY17. The cumulative net foreign investment in Indian equities dropped to the lowest level in 12 years to ₹7.1 lakh crore in FY27.
In the second half of May, automobiles and oil and gas sectors reported worth over ₹2,000 crore. On May 29, The MSCI rebalancing led to outflows worth ₹8,000-8,500 crore which also factored in the outflows for this fortnight. “Changes in the MSCI Index shifts the composition of not just index funds that mimic the index but also weighs on decisions of other funds,who largely use MSCI indices as benchmarks” said Bhat.Among sectors that reported net inflows in the second half of May, metals attracted nearly 60% of the inflows -the highest foreign inflows worth ₹4,999 crore for the period. The sector witnessed inflows worth over ₹6,500 crore in May.

Edited excerpts from a chat:

How are you viewing the Indian equity market at current valuations, and where do you see the next leg of earnings growth coming from?
At an index level, large caps are trading below their long-term average valuations, while mid- and small-cap stocks are trading above them. This divergence reflects stronger recent earnings delivery and higher liquidity in the broader markets, but it also suggests greater valuation comfort and a stronger margin of safety in large caps. In the near term, earnings growth is expected to be driven by the rally in commodities, benefiting metals & mining and select energy companies. As West Asia tensions ease and supply chains normalize, earnings growth should broaden and be led by the financial, consumer, industrial, and healthcare sectors.
Financials continue to remain a key pillar of the Indian market. What is your outlook on banks and financial services over the next 12-18 months?

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India is currently in the midst of a favourable credit cycle, which began post-COVID following a prolonged weak phase (FY14–FY20) marked by the NPA crisis. The clean-up of balance sheets over the past few years has laid a strong foundation for sustainable growth in the financial sector. For lending businesses, which constitute a significant portion of the financials universe, asset quality remains the most critical driver and continues to be robust across both banks and NBFCs.
Additionally, credit growth has accelerated, supported by improved systemic liquidity following RBI measures. The interest rate cycle appears to have bottomed out, with a moderate upward bias, which should support net interest margins (NIMs) for lenders. From a balance sheet perspective, both banks and NBFCs are well capitalized, positioning them to capture incremental credit demand and sustain growth.
Private sector banks are trading at attractive valuations, especially given their consistent book value compounding and superior return ratios. PSU banks, while trading above historical averages, still appear reasonable on an absolute basis, supported by improved profitability and healthier balance sheets, albeit with somewhat lower growth and compounding relative to private peers.
Importantly, the financials landscape has broadened beyond traditional lending businesses. Sub-sectors such as insurance and capital markets are experiencing structural growth tailwinds, adding new dimensions to the sector. These segments are benefiting from rising penetration and increasing financialization. Within banking, CASA ratios have structurally declined, reflecting a shift in household savings toward capital markets and higher-yielding instruments.

PSU stocks have delivered strong returns over the past two years. Do you believe the rerating story still has further room to play out?
Over the past two years, the PSU index has marginally underperformed the broader market following a strong post-COVID re-rating. Much of the structural re-rating in PSU stocks now appears to be largely priced in, with valuations settling closer to fair levels. Going forward, a stock-specific approach is essential, as broad-based multiple expansion is largely behind us. Within the PSU universe, we continue to see selective opportunities, particularly in segments benefiting from structural tailwinds such as defense, new energy, and maritime.

Technology stocks are navigating global uncertainty and AI-led disruption. How are you approaching the IT sector at this stage?
The IT services sector appears quite attractive, with companies currently offering compelling free cash flow (FCF) yields of around 4–5%. Revenue growth also seems to have bottomed out, as guidance from several companies for the upcoming year is broadly in line with last year’s performance. We expect revenue growth to accelerate as enterprise adoption of AI increases going forward.

Recent news flow around AI-led disruption appears somewhat exaggerated. IT services is a services-oriented sector rather than a product-centric one, making it less susceptible to obsolescence. In fact, these companies play a critical role in enabling their clients to adopt and invest in new technologies, rather than being disrupted by them.

The industry has successfully navigated multiple technology cycles in the past, and with each new wave of innovation, spending on related services has only increased. While global uncertainty can impact decision-making around technology investments in the near term, such investments are typically deferred rather than cancelled and should recover over time.

We remain overweight on the sector.

Largecaps have lagged broader markets in recent years. Do you expect leadership to shift back toward largecap stocks going ahead?
Large caps have lagged the broader market in recent years, creating an attractive valuation gap relative to both mid- and small-cap stocks and their own historical averages. This underperformance has been driven largely by financials and IT services, both of which now appear attractive from a valuation perspective.

We expect earnings acceleration in financials, driven by increasing credit growth and healthy book value compounding supported by a favourable credit cycle. On the other hand, an improvement in earnings in the IT services sector is still awaited, as a pickup in enterprise adoption of AI has yet to materialize. However, earnings in this sector appear to have bottomed out, and valuations remain attractive, supported by healthy free cash flow yields.

Both sectors appear well positioned to demonstrate improving earnings growth, thereby presenting a case for mean reversion from a valuation standpoint.

Overall, mid- and small-cap stocks appear expensive at the index level. However, within these segments, there are selective opportunities that offer a long runway for strong growth.

Do you think midcaps are in a bull cycle and best placed to navigate global uncertainties?
Like the broader market, the midcap index has delivered sub-optimal returns over the past two years, generating only ~6–7% CAGR. However, despite this modest price performance, valuations at the index level remain elevated relative to long-term historical averages.

Recent geopolitical tensions related to the Iran conflict have introduced an additional layer of uncertainty for corporate earnings in the near term, particularly through potential supply chain disruptions and input cost volatility.

In this environment, a stock-specific approach becomes critical. A significant portion of the midcap universe has already evolved into relatively large and well-established businesses, many of which offer a meaningful runway for growth. As valuations correct or become more reasonable, such companies could present attractive opportunities for investors

From a 5 year view, which sectors are you most bullish on and why?
Over the next five years, financials, consumer, and healthcare are expected to be key outperformers, supported by strong structural drivers. Within these sectors, select sub-segments offer high-growth opportunities.

Within the consumer space, themes such as e-commerce, quick commerce, organized retail, and aviation are well positioned. These are being driven by rising per capita income and the nuclearization of households, which are accelerating discretionary spending and increasing the preference for convenience.

In financials, the capital markets ecosystem appears particularly attractive, driven by increasing financialization of savings, rising retail participation, and improved market structures.

In healthcare, hospital services are expected to see strong growth, supported by rising income levels, increased health awareness, and higher insurance penetration, leading to a shift toward organized healthcare providers.

Beyond these, several emerging themes also stand out. Electronics manufacturing should benefit from geopolitical shifts and policy support for indigenous production. Industrial firms catering to strong pockets of private capex such as data centers, electrification, and battery-enabled storage systems are also likely to see robust growth, supported by rising demand for new technologies and energy.