Volatility leaves mkts directionless

Fri, 8 Jan 01:30 pm

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The Indian stock markets remained volatile during the previous two hours of trade, oscillating to either side of the dotted line a number of times. Though currently in the green, they are inching slowly towards the dotted line. Stocks from the banking, telecom and IT sectors are trading weak, while stocks from the realty, power, capital goods sectors are finding favour.

The BSE Sensex and NSE Nifty are trading in the green, marginally down by 5 points each. However, midcap and small cap indices have managed to buck the trend. The BSE-Midcap and the BSE-Smallcap are trading up by 0.8% and 1.3% respectively. The rupee is trading at 45.73 to the dollar.

CV (commercial vehicle) major Ashok Leyland announced its sales volumes for the month of December 2009 yesterday. The company reported an increase of 164% in its sales volume in December 2009. The company sold a robust 6,099 units in December 2009 compared to 2,307 units in the comparable month last year. Out of this, the domestic sales stood at 5,536 units for the month which was a year on year increase of 294%. The company's exports however fell to 563 units as against 901 units in December 2008. However, the total sales for the period of 9mFY10 declined by 13% to 38,117 units compared to 43,643 units in the same period of the previous year. The company witnessed its highest ever State Transport Undertakings sales during December 2009, on the back of Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban-Rural Mission orders. The management has indicated that the healthy demand for goods vehicles was back on account of the growth in the industrial production. The stock of Ashok Leyland opened on a strong note today and is currently trading higher on the bourses.

As per a leading business daily, L&T and Tata Steel are planning to jointly set up a container handling facility at Dhamra port in Orissa to tap demand for containerised cargo in the eastern part of India. It may be noted that L&T and Tata Steel are the developer and operator of Dhamra port respectively. The two companies have decided to have a container terminal at the port with an initial capacity to handle 500,000 standard containers a year, which will be scaled up to 1 m standard containers a year according to demand. L&T and Tata Steel are equal partners in Dhamra Port, which will start operating the first phase of the new cargo handling port by June with a capacity to handle 22 m tonnes (mt) of iron ore, coking coal, thermal coal and limestone a year. The JV has invested close to Rs 20 bn for developing the first phase of the port. The companies are also exploring the possibility of having a strategic partner to run the container terminal. Further, apart from catering to the captive use of Tata Steel, the port will tap the cargo generating states of West Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand for business.