It is often said that sentiment is the main oxygen of the stock market and in a weird situation, a company having oxygen in its name raised to prominence despite its business being an altogether different domain.

India is undergoing its worst crisis with oxygen becoming rare to be an available commodity, investors looking to profit from the crisis started investing fervently in companies that manufacture oxygen. Bombay oxygen investments share skyrocketed by up to 133% in a month with even BSE asking clarification from the company due to the uncharacteristic movement.

But the surprising part of all this is that the said company is an RBI registered NBFC (Non-Banking Financial Company) and has stopped its oxygen manufacturing business way back in 2019. Earlier the company was known as Bombay Oxygen Corporation but the name was changed in the third quarter of the financial year 2019. On the company website, the firm states that its primary business was manufacturing and supplying Industrial gases till August 2019, after which the same was discontinued. “The Company owns substantial financial investments in the form of shares, mutual funds and other financial securities and the income from such financial investments is the source of revenue of the Company,” Bombay Oxygen said. 

As per the company’s report from 2019-20, it received a registration certificate as an NBFC from RBI, and other than that is in no business or manufacturing of any products. The share price of Bombay Oxygen Investment was trading at a flat price of Rs 10,000 on March 25 and since then started galloping higher to reach a 52-week high of Rs 25,500 earlier on Tuesday.

Seeing the unusual movement, the BSE sought a clarification to safeguard investors. To this, the company replied " all the material information and announcement that may have bearing on the operations (or) performance of the company which includes all the necessary disclosures have always been disclosed by the company within the stipulated time. There is no pending information or announcement which may have a bearing on the price movement of the company. Therefore, the movement in the share price of the company is market-driven and the company is in no way connected with any such movement in price. "

This is not the first time such a thing has been done by small retail investors though, during the IT boom of the early 2000s a textile manufacturing company that promoted its clothes as having a “ Soft Wear “ gained a lot of interest from investors similar to the current situation.