Every quarter, listed companies publish their results, and investors who want to learn how to read quarterly results start with the same lines, such as revenue, operating profit, net profit and the profit before exceptional items. The September quarter (Q2 FY27) results season began around 8 October 2026 with TCS. Brokers expect the The NSE's main stock index, which tracks 50 large, actively traded companies and weights each by the market value of its publicly tradable shares. Read the full meaning of Nifty 50 companies to report a sharp rise in profit after tax (PAT), which is the final profit left after interest, depreciation and tax are deducted.
Motilal Oswal Financial Services (MOFSL) predicts that Nifty 50 PAT will rise 27% year on year, the highest rise in 17 quarters. Other brokerage estimates come a bit lower at 24.7%, but even this figure will be the best in 12 quarters. Oil and gas, metals and autos are expected to lead the growth.
The wider market is also part of the same estimate. MOFSL covers a universe of 399 companies, and its report says, "We expect strong broad-based earnings growth, with aggregate earnings for the MOFSL universe surging 22% Y-o-Y."
It must be stated clearly that the real total profit of the Nifty 50 companies for Q2 FY27 was not known on 30 October. Every number quoted above is a forecast prepared by brokerage houses; the final figures may be higher or lower once all the companies have reported.
Even though, many investors are already reading these forecasts as an indication that the quarter will prove to be a very good one for corporate earnings. Families who invest via mutual funds or directly in stocks are taking notice of headlines in newspapers and on business channels, and a figure such as 27% sticks out in memory.
However, a single growth figure for an index is based on 50 companies of very different sizes and business models. The figure is calculated on the profit of an earlier quarter, includes one‑off gains that might not recur, and few large companies can tilt the whole index significantly. Readers who peruse the notes to accounts of a company before looking at the headline often see a picture that differs from the one stated in the first line of a news piece.
The following sections will break down where these figures come from, and what a diligent reader can examine in the outcomes of a company.
A low base and a few big names do the lifting
One report dated 13th October mentions that the strong estimates for the quarter, ranging between 20% and 27%, are largely due to a low base. The preceding year was a sluggish period for company earnings, so even a modest rise in profit would appear as a high percentage growth.
The report also points out higher oil prices, increasing input costs and selling by foreign institutional investors (A foreign portfolio investor (FPI) is an overseas entity registered with SEBI that buys Indian shares and bonds for returns without taking control. Read the full meaning of FII and FPI) as risks that could affect these estimates. Therefore, those who keep an eye on the market read the forecasts with these warnings in mind, not just the growth figure.
The concentration of earnings is another aspect that the brokerage notes have pointed out. Tata Motors PV is expected to be the single biggest contributor to the Nifty 50 earnings growth this quarter, at nearly 15% of the incremental growth year on year. If this one company performs more or less than expected, the index level will swing with it and the other 49 companies will play a lesser part than what headline numbers seem to indicate.
The split by company size, as given by MOFSL, shows that the growth is not same across the market. Profit after tax is expected to rise 23% for large caps, 11% for mid caps and 29% for small caps.
The sales growth is expected to be 19% for large caps, 20% for mid caps, and 17% for small caps. In addition, the earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation, commonly called EBITDA is the operating profit of a company before interest, income tax, depreciation and amortisation are deducted from it. Read the full meaning of EBITDA, the operating profit before those expenses, will rise by 18%, 9% and 16% for the three groups respectively.
When you compare these three groups, a clear gap appears. For the small‑cap stocks, the sales are expected to grow by 17%, EBITDA by 16%, but PAT is expected to jump to 29%. For the mid‑caps, EBITDA growth of 9% is beside a PAT growth of 11% and the sales figure of 20% is far higher than the two.
PAT can grow faster than EBITDA when the interest cost falls, or the tax burden is lower, or when the income earned from activities outside the core business, referred to as other income, goes up. Gains that arise from one‑time items, listed separately as exceptional items, can also boost PAT even if the main business is not changing. So a company whose operating profit is growing only a little can still report a sharp jump in its final profit.
So, a lot of careful readers of the results like to put the EBITDA growth figure next to the PAT growth figure before accepting any one of them. A big difference between the two doesn’t prove that something is wrong, but it tells the reader that something beyond the day‑to‑day business has helped to pull the result.
Past results where profit told the wrong story
Results from earlier quarters show how a headline profit figure can point in a different direction from the business of a company. In Q1FY26, the early companies to report had a combined profit before tax (PBT) excluding other income that fell 10.3% year on year, as per Business Standard.
Other income which includes one time gains, has risen by 65.6% to around Rs 73,000 crore during that period. This accounts for 50.3% of the PBT, so half of the profit before tax of these companies has come from sources outside their regular operations.
RIL recorded a one‑time gain of Rs 8,924 crore from selling a 4.9% stake in Asian Paints, while HDFC Bank earned Rs 9,128 crore by divesting a portion of its holdings in HDB Financial Services during the A company's first offer of its shares to the public, after which the shares are listed on a stock exchange and can be bought or sold by any investor. Read the full meaning of IPO of the latter.
A tax entry had a similar effect at Ambuja Cement in Q2FY26. Company's profit jumped 268% to Rs 1,766 crore, and a one time reversal of an income tax provision of Rs 1,697 crore was behind most of it.
Exceptional items can also reduce profit. Vedanta's PAT in Q2FY26 fell 37.9% to Rs 3,479 crore, even though the total income of company had risen to Rs 40,464 crore. Exceptional outgo of Rs 2,067 crore, which included a write-off of Rs 1,407 crore, caused the fall.
JSW Cement shows same pattern in a different form. In Q1FY26, the company's pre tax profit before exceptional items was Rs 164.74 crore, against Rs 8.14 crore in the earlier year, so the operations were clearly doing better.
An exceptional charge of Rs 1,466 crore, which came from the conversion of compulsorily convertible preference shares (CCPS), pushed the company to a net loss. A reader who looked only at the bottom line would have missed the improvement in the business, while a reader who looked at the profit before exceptional items would have seen it.
Each of these cases reached the newspapers with a strong headline, and in each of them the notes to accounts told a more detailed story. The one time gain at RIL and HDFC Bank, the tax entry at Ambuja Cement and the charges at Vedanta and JSW Cement were all disclosed by the companies in their own filings, usually few lines below the headline figure.
Investors who followed these results are now going through the exceptional items and tax lines with more attention than before. Some families who hold these shares through mutual funds had seen the profit figures in the news and assumed that the business had moved in same direction, and the filings showed otherwise in several cases.
For an ordinary retail investor, such cases remind that PAT growth and business growth are different. The gap usually lies in other income, tax and exceptional items; these same lines will also be needed to interpret the Q2 FY27 results.
What a ten-minute read looks at, and what comes next
When a reader goes through a company’s report in about ten minutes, usually the first thing they do is look at three lines that appear together, revenue, EBITDA, and profit before tax (PBT) before exceptional items. If the revenue and EBITDA are rising and the PBT before exceptional items is rising along with them, it means the improvement is coming from the business itself. But if those three lines are moving in different directions, the reader immediately knows where they need to dig deeper.
The next step is the other income line. Many investors are now checking how much of the PBT has come from interest on treasury investments, A dividend is a part of a company's profit that the board decides to pay to shareholders, usually in cash, in proportion to the shares held. Read the full meaning of Dividend or the sale of a stake and how much from the products and services the company sells. The tax line is read in the same manner, because a lower tax charge or a reversal of an earlier provision can raise the final profit without any change in sales.
Last, the note on exceptional items is opened. Companies describe in this note what the item was, whether it was a gain or a charge, and in which line of statement it has been placed. Investors who read this note find that the headline profit can be separated into a core part and a one time part within a few minutes.
The full‑year expectations are lower than those for the September quarter. MOFSL, however, is at the higher end, projecting 17% for FY27 and 13% for FY28.
The reason given by brokerages for this slowdown is rising cost pressure. The pace of earnings growth is expected to moderate in the second half (H2) of the financial year, once the benefit of the low base of the earlier year is no longer available.
Many families which invest via mutual funds are now faced with two different pictures in a single week, a very high growth estimate for the quarter and a much lower forecast for the whole year. Both are only projections, none has been backed up yet by the figures that have actually been published.
With this wide spread, the expected slowdown in H2 becomes the figure to keep an eye on.
