Nepse turns bearish, slides to 312.1 points
KATHMANDU, FEB 12:
The capital market is sliding back towards 300 points, as the manufacturing sector has become vulnerable due to the ongoing strike at one of the strongest stocks coupled with the ongoing gloom in the financial sector.
In the week - February 5 to 9 - the market lost 4.34 points reaching 312.10 points. The closure, due to labour problems, of one of Unilever’s factories pulled the company’s stock price down by Rs 600 making the manufacturing subgroup lose 31.37 points.
All the subgroups ended in the red zone with the manufacturing subgroup heading the losers’ pack, this week. The loss in share prices of hydropower companies pulled down the subgroup by 11.69 points.
Commercial banks, development banks and finance companies also went down by 3.74, 1.88 and 3.88 points, respectively.
Nepal Telecom’s share prices went down by Rs 2 pulling down the others subgroup by 3.52 points. Insurance companies and hotels also lost 5.32 points and 0.76 points, respectively. The future direction of the market will depend on the second quarter financials which will be out by next week.
On Sunday, the stock market opened at 316.44 points that declined to 314.71 points by the end of the day. Since then, the benchmark index kept going south and at the end of the week the index reached 312.10 points.
The stock exchange’s trading volume witnessed the trading of 497,787 unit shares worth Rs 106.2 million through 5784 transactions of 118 companies. Trading volume this week remained almost stationary from last week with an increment of 0.94 per cent as compared to that of last week when the stock exchange witnessed trading worth Rs 105.2 million.
The trading of blue chip stocks amounted to Rs 72 million and class ‘A’ companies contributed 66.1 per cent of the total transactions. The sensitive index that measures the performance of Class ‘A’ companies went down by 0.94 points reaching 77.48 points at the end of the week. The float index, the indicator of the performance of actual shares traded, went down by a meagre 0.03 points to 24.67 points.
Bank of Kathmandu was the forerunner in terms of transaction amount with Rs 12 million, and in the number of shares traded, Nepal SBI Bank topped the charts with a trading of 29,392 shares. Gurans Life Insurance outperformed others in the number of transactions with 298 transactions.
The top five performers of the week are Bank of Kathmandu (Rs 12.09m), Nepal SBI Bank (Rs 11.82m,) Chilime Hydropower Company (Rs 7.07m), Laxmi Bank (Rs 6.30m) and Nepal Telecom (Rs 4.75m).
Source: THT
