Indian stock markets continued with their downward spiral for the third day in a row on the back of a similar trend amongst global equities. The decline came even as Finance Minister assured investors of the health of India's economy. Thus, while BSE-Sensex lost in the region of 214 points (down 1.1%), NSE-Nifty ended 60 points lower. The BSE Mid Cap and BSE Small Cap indices suffered similar fate, down 1.4% and 1.1% respectively. Auto and Realty were the biggest losers.
As regards global markets, Asian stock markets closed the day in the red while European stocks are also trading weak currently. The rupee was trading at Rs 58.2 to the dollar at the time of writing.
BPCL, one of India's largest oil refiners, has stated that it is planning to increase its refining capacity to 40 million tonnes per annum (mtpa). It should be noted that this is a more than 30% jump to its existing capacity of around 30.5 mtpa. Most of the expansion is likely to happen at the company's Kochi refinery as the Mumbai refinery faces space constraints. In FY14, the management expects capex to be higher at around Rs 50 bn with main focus on integrated refinery expansion at Kochi. Besides this expansion, the company has significant assets in the upstream segment that will drive growth in the long term. The stock closed lower by 1% today.
SAIL, another Government owned PSU but in the steel sector and which is also undertaking expansion will build more capacity in the captive sources as it aims to ramp up its steel production capacity to more than 23 m tonnes by 2015-16. With the help of this initiative, it is planning to meet all its iron ore requirements from these sources. The total investment outlay is expected to be in the region of Rs 100 bn which will be spent on enhancing iron ore production capacity to 42.8 m tonnes from 27.9 m tonnes currently. The stock closed lower by more than 2% today.
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