COMMENTARY
INTERVIEWS
SPECIALS
CHAT
ARCHIVES

Steel, textile shares fare well; infotech, pharma dip; Sensex recovers from early fall, 3287.53

Pivotals staged a marginal recovery at the Bombay Stock Exchange on moderate buying support from foreign institutional investors in select scrips today.

Reflecting the recovery, the 30-scrip Sensex opened at 3292.57 points, touched the day's high of 3297.38 and fell to the day's low of 3237.18, losing nearly 60 points from the day's high on bull liquidation in the index-based scrips.

However, the Sensex recovered smartly towards the close at 3287.53 points, showing a net gain of 3.56 points over the previous close, due to good buying interest mainly from FIIs in the heavy-weighted counters.

The broad-based BSE-100 index also rose by eight points to 1454.17 points from the yesterday's close of 1446.17 points.

According to leading BSE brokers, the FIIs reportedly bought considerable number of shares of IPCL, ITC, Pentafour Software, Tata Tea, Telco and Reliance.

Dealers attributed the recovery in the share prices during the last hour to the better picture of economy etched in the economic survery that was presented in Parliament today by Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha. They said the market was expecting the decline in the GDP growth by about six to seven per cent, whereas it was estimated at 5.8 per cent, far better than their expectations.

On the expectations of anti-dumping duty in the Budget for the protection of textile and steel industry, shares of textile sector rose sharply today. Arvind Mills, Century Textiles even hit the upward circuit filters, dealers said.

However, the infotech counters witnessed mixed trend on the overall lower expectations from the Budget. The pharma shares including Glaxo, Dr Reddy's lost heavily on bear hammering, they said.

The BSE-200 and Dollex indices rose marginally by 1.56 and 0.45 points at 336.30 and 131.77 points as against the previous close of 334.74 and 131.32 points respectively.

UNI

Business news