> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.moatmarginresearch.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Wide-Moat Stocks in India: We Scored 507 Companies and Found None - URL: https://www.moatmarginresearch.com/wide-moat-stocks-india/ - Published: 2026-08-09T12:35:37.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-05T15:38:46.000Z - Description: We scored 507 Indian companies across 29 sectors for economic moats and found zero wide ones — 351 narrow, 122 narrow-trending-wide, 31 capped. The full table is free, every score broken out by dimension. - Author: A K Karthikeyan - Tags: Moat Insights If you search for wide-moat Indian stocks, you will find a list within about four seconds. Usually thirteen names. Usually CDSL near the top. We scored 507 Indian companies against a formal moat framework. We found zero wide moats. Not "few." None. Eighty-eight came out narrow, twenty-five came out narrow with the trend widening, and the wide column is empty. The highest score in the entire set belongs to the National Stock Exchange at 7.69 — a business that clears the country's equity trading and is still, on our reading, narrow. One of us is wrong, and it matters which. ## What the lists say The consensus case is not stupid. It is actually quite good, and it deserves to be stated at full strength before anyone picks at it. India has businesses that look structurally protected in ways that would make a Morningstar analyst reach for the wide-moat stamp. CDSL and BSE sit inside a two-player market infrastructure duopoly that no new entrant can meaningfully contest, because the regulator would have to license them first. Titan has spent four decades turning gold retail from a trust problem into a brand. Pidilite owns the mind of the Indian carpenter so completely that Fevicol became the verb. Asian Paints built a dealer network that competitors have spent twenty years and several billion rupees failing to replicate. TCS switched costs into its clients' back offices so deeply that leaving is a multi-year board-level project. That's a real argument. The lists that circulate on X and on the retail finance sites — thirteen names, six names, ten names — are not making it up. They are pointing at genuine structural advantages. Where they lose me is the next step: calling those advantages *wide*. ## The company that broke the list Take CDSL, since almost every Indian wide-moat list includes it. The network effect is textbook. Every demat account in the country sits with CDSL or NSDL. Switching is absurd. New entrants need a licence that isn't being handed out. If you were designing a moat from first principles, you would design this. Then, last quarter, this happened. SEBI mandated a **20% cut in KRA fetch charges**, from ₹35 to ₹28, and a **75% cut in creation charges**, from ₹20 to ₹5\. CDSL's KYC subsidiary CVL grew revenue 22% year on year. Its profit before tax fell 4%. Read those two numbers next to each other. Twenty-two percent more business, four percent less profit, because the entity that sets the price is not the company and never was. That is the whole problem with the word "wide" as it gets used in India. CDSL has an unassailable position. What it does not have is pricing power. It earns a **volume annuity** — it gets paid per transaction on a tariff someone else writes. Those two things look identical on a screener and behave completely differently the moment the regulator opens a consultation paper. ## What the screeners are actually measuring Here is the part that took me a while to see clearly. Every moat screener available for Indian stocks — the popular ones on screener.in, Trendlyne's economic-moat screen, Tickertape's filters — screens on the same handful of things. High ROE. High ROCE. Rising ROCE over five years. Piotroski score. Altman Z. Those are all outcomes. A moat is a *cause*. ROCE is what a moat leaves behind after it works, the way a footprint is what a boot leaves behind after it walks. Screening for high ROCE finds you companies that have recently earned well. It cannot distinguish between a company that earned well because competitors can't touch it and a company that earned well because nobody happened to attack it that year. CDSL passed every ratio screen in the country right up until the quarter the tariff changed. Nothing in the ratios saw it coming, because the thing that changed wasn't in the ratios. It was in a SEBI circular. So we do it the slow way. We read the filings — annual reports, concall transcripts, investor presentations — and we score seven dimensions on whether the *company's own disclosures* contain a mechanism that would survive an attack. Every dimension needs a verbatim quote with a page number, or it scores zero. The methodology is [here](https://www.moatmarginresearch.com/moatos/), and the reasoning behind it is [here](https://www.moatmarginresearch.com/why-moat/). Doing it that way, 507 companies produced no wide moats. Plenty of narrow ones. ## Three things the filings said that the lists don't mention **TCS, on switching costs.** The switching-cost story is true and we score it — TCS comes out at 5.04, narrow. What the ratio screens don't capture is that switching costs protect the *existing* book, not the next contract. A moat that defends revenue you already have while your win-rate on new work erodes is a moat with a maturity date. We wrote it up in the [TCS note](https://www.moatmarginresearch.com/tata-consultancy-services-moat/). **Marico, on pricing power, doing the thing the textbook says is impossible.** Copra prices were falling. Marico *cut* prices — "selective price actions to pass on value to consumers" — and Parachute volume grew 10%. Cutting price into a soft input cycle and gaining volume is a stronger pricing-power signal than any increase, because it proves the brand can hold share without buying it. Nobody's screener rewards a price cut. It looks like weakness in the data and reads as strength in the transcript. That one's written up in [full](https://www.moatmarginresearch.com/marico-pricing-power/). **Zydus, on the only moat that comes with a receipt.** Zydus received US FDA final approval for Indocyanine Green for Injection with **180-day Competitive Generic Exclusivity** — a window in which no other generic can be approved. That is a real, legally enforceable barrier. It is also the clearest illustration of what "wide" should mean and why so few things qualify: this moat has an expiry date written into it, and everyone can read the date. Most claimed Indian moats have no such document. They have a market position that has not yet been tested. ## The distinction that does the work Unattacked is not the same as unattackable. That sentence is the entire argument of this piece, and almost everything in the Indian moat discourse collapses if you take it seriously. A great deal of what gets called a wide moat here is a business operating in a market that has been structurally protected by something other than the company's own competitive strength — regulatory licensing, import barriers, a fragmented unorganised competitor base, or simply a market growing fast enough that nobody needed to fight over share. Those are real advantages. They produce real returns. They are also *borrowed*, and the lender can call them in. CDSL's lender was SEBI, and SEBI called. Last week we also watched Aditya Birla Fashion & Retail tell its own shareholders about "competitive intensity" in value retail, with EBITDA margin at 8.2% — three days after Trent explained in its own presentation why the same fight is asymmetric in *its* favour, thanks to owning its brands and its distribution. Same market. Two opposite self-assessments, filed seventy-two hours apart. At most one of them is describing a wide moat. We score for the difference. That's why the number is zero. ## Where we might be wrong This is the part I'd want to read first if someone handed me this article, so it goes in rather than in a footnote. Zero is a suspicious number. When a measurement system returns none of something, the first suspect is the measurement system. Our moat gate is deliberately severe: a company's score is capped by the weaker of two things, how hard its advantage is to replicate and how easy it is to bypass. A business can look formidable on six dimensions and still be capped by one bypass route. That design choice is defensible — a moat with a bypass isn't a moat — but it is a *choice*, and a different reasonable framework would produce narrow-to-wide verdicts on several names in our table. There is a second, less comfortable possibility. Our evidence standard requires a verbatim disclosure with a page cite. Indian filings are, on average, less forthcoming than US filings about competitive dynamics. It is genuinely difficult to separate "this company has no durable advantage" from "this company does not write about its advantages in the annual report." We think the framework mostly handles this, because we read concall transcripts where managements are far looser than they are in an AR. But mostly is not entirely, and a systematic disclosure bias would push our scores down across the board in exactly the way we observe. So take the zero as a claim about what the filings will support, not a claim about Indian business quality. Those are different statements and we can only defend the first one. ## The table Every company below is scored and published. Ratings: NARROW means a real but limited advantage; N→W means narrow today with the trend widening. **Basis** matters more than most readers expect — "Deep dive" is our two-pass standard with full extraction, "First-pass" is a single pass and should be read as provisional. | Company | Sector | Score | Moat | Basis | | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------ | ----- | ------ | ---------- | | [Polycab India](https://www.moatmarginresearch.com/polycab-india-moat/) | Electricals | 7.08 | N→W | First-pass | | [Asian Paints](https://www.moatmarginresearch.com/paint-wars-asian-paints/) | Paints | 6.83 | NARROW | Deep dive | | [Britannia Industries](https://www.moatmarginresearch.com/britannia-industries-moat/) | FMCG | 6.16 | NARROW | First-pass | | [ICICI Bank](https://www.moatmarginresearch.com/icici-bank-moat/) | Banks | 6.05 | NARROW | Deep dive | | [HDB Financial Services](https://www.moatmarginresearch.com/hdb-financial-services-moat/) | NBFC | 5.83 | N→W | First-pass | | [SBI Life Insurance](https://www.moatmarginresearch.com/sbi-life-insurance-moat/) | Insurance | 5.79 | N→W | First-pass | | [Nuvama Wealth](https://www.moatmarginresearch.com/nuvama-wealth-management-moat/) | Broking | 5.68 | N→W | First-pass | | [IRFC](https://www.moatmarginresearch.com/indian-railway-finance-moat/) | Infra Finance | 5.65 | N→W | First-pass | | [Dr. Reddy's](https://www.moatmarginresearch.com/dr-reddy-s-laboratories-moat/) | Pharma | 5.64 | N→W | First-pass | | [HDFC AMC](https://www.moatmarginresearch.com/hdfc-asset-management-moat/) | Asset Mgmt | 5.61 | NARROW | First-pass | | [Hero MotoCorp](https://www.moatmarginresearch.com/hero-motocorp-moat/) | Auto | 5.60 | N→W | First-pass | | [PNB Housing Finance](https://www.moatmarginresearch.com/pnb-housing-finance-moat/) | Housing Finance | 5.59 | N→W | First-pass | | [PI Industries](https://www.moatmarginresearch.com/pi-industries-moat/) | Chemicals | 5.54 | N→W | First-pass | | [CRISIL](https://www.moatmarginresearch.com/crisil-moat/) | Ratings | 5.50 | NARROW | First-pass | | [Astral](https://www.moatmarginresearch.com/astral-moat/) | Building Materials | 5.49 | NARROW | Deep dive | | [BSE](https://www.moatmarginresearch.com/bse-moat/) | Exchanges | 5.48 | NARROW | First-pass | | [CDSL](https://www.moatmarginresearch.com/central-depository-services-india-moat/) | Market Infra | 5.36 | NARROW | First-pass | | [TCS](https://www.moatmarginresearch.com/tata-consultancy-services-moat/) | IT Services | 5.04 | NARROW | First-pass | Note what isn't here: a wide-moat column with entries in it. And note CDSL at 5.36, scored before the tariff cut landed — the framework had it narrow on the evidence, and the regulator then demonstrated why. **All 507 companies are in the [Moat Screener](https://www.moatmarginresearch.com/moat-screener/), free and without a signup**, with each one broken out by dimension — D1 through D7, the composite, the rating and the basis. That's where to go if you want to argue with a specific score rather than with the headline, and I'd rather you argued with a specific score. Two honesty notes about that table. Of the 507, only **14 are deep dives** — our two-pass standard with full extraction. **97 are first-pass** and should be read as provisional; **2 are gated**. And the National Stock Exchange sits at the top of it at 7.69 without appearing in the list above, because NSE is not itself listed — you cannot buy it, so it does not belong in a table of stocks. It belongs in the argument, though. The single most structurally protected financial business in the country, and the dimension that caps it is the same one that caps CDSL. ## What to watch instead of a list If "wide moat in India" is mostly a category error today, the useful question becomes which narrow moats are widening — and that is answerable from disclosure rather than from opinion. Three things we track for it. Whether a company can hold or grow volume while cutting price, which is the Marico signal and the hardest one to fake. Whether the barrier is written in a document with a date on it, like the Zydus exclusivity, or merely asserted in an investor presentation. And whether the price is set by the company or by somebody else — because that single question separates a franchise from an annuity, and CDSL just paid for the lesson on everyone's behalf. ## The question this leaves you Not a recommendation — we don't make those. Pick the one holding you feel most confident about, and go find the sentence in its last annual report or concall transcript where management explains *why* a competitor cannot do what they do. Not the outcome. The mechanism. Page number and all. If you can find it, you own something better than a screener told you. If you can't find it, you have learned something more valuable than a list of thirteen names. --- > MoatMargin Research publishes evidence, not advice. Every figure and quote above is drawn from company filings, auditors' reports or filed transcripts. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Scores are our own reading of disclosed evidence and may be wrong; the receipts are published so you can check.