It was yet another insipid trading session for the Indian markets with the benchmark indices registering modest gains. After being under pressure for majority of the day, markets managed to recover some losses towards the fag end shutting shop off intra-day lows.
The NSE Nifty which broke below the 5100 levels nearly three times during the day, held on to the important level thanks to index heavyweights Reliance Industries and HDFC Bank. While the 17,000 mark remained intact on the BSE Sensex.
However, the breath on the BSE Sensex was negative, out of the total 2905 stocks, 1648 declined as against 1185 advances and 72 remained unchanged.
Among the 30-components of Sensex, 18 stocks ended in the positive and 12 ended in the red.
The BSE Sensex advanced 46 points to end at 17,098 after touching a high of 17,183 and a low of 17,028. The NSE Nifty added 15 points to end at 5,116.
In Asia, the Nikkei in Japan ended flat, while Australia's S&P/ASX also remained unchanged and Hang Seng index in Hong Kong also ended flat.
Even in Europe stocks were trading flat. The DAX in Germany was up 0.2%; the CAC 40 index in France was up 0.2% and the FTSE in the UK was flat.
Coming back to India, among the BSE sectoral indices, the Oil & Gas index was the top gainer, adding 1%, followed by the FMCG index that was up 0.8% and the BSE Realty index was up 0.6%.
Among the losers were BSE Teck index down 0.5% and BSE IT index down 0.4%. Even, the BSE Mid-Cap index was down 0.2% and BSE Small-Cap index was down 0.3%.
Outside the frontline indices, the big gainers in the broader market were M&M Finance, IDFC, Thermax and Indian Hotels. On the other hand, losers included Balrampur Chini, Renuka Sugars, Adani Ent and RCF.
Thermax announced the formation of a strategic joint venture with Babcock & Wilcox Power Generation Group, Inc. to engineer, manufacture and supply supercritical boilers for the Indian power sector. The Joint venture will also manufacture subcritical boilers over 300MW in size.
The stock gained 2.3% to end at Rs671. It opened at Rs658 it touched an intra-day high of Rs680 and a low of Rs658 and recorded volumes of over 0.18mn shares on NSE.
Texmo Pipes and Products, manufacturer of PVC pipes had a scintillating debut on Wednesday. The stock shot up to Rs139 as against its issue price of Rs90 per share, translating into a premium of 54%.
The company had come out with a public issue of 5mn shares in a price band of Rs85 to Rs90 each to raise over Rs425mn. The IPO of Texmo Pipes & Products Limited received subscription of 7.48 times.
The QIBs portion received subscription of 1.02 times with bids for 2499900 equity shares against the offer of 2450000 equity shares. The Non Institutional Investors portion was subscribed 30.4962 times receiving bids for 22414725 equity shares against the offer of 735000 equity shares. The Retail Individual Investors portion of the issue received subscription of 7.26 times.
The company proposes to invest the proceeds to expand its PVC pipes capacity by 66%, start making pipefittings and diversify in woven sacks by October 2010. Post-IPO, the promoter group’s stake in the company will come down to 55.6% from the current 100%.
After being under pressure in the previous trading session, shares of Tata Motors bounced back and gained by 1% to end at Rs780 after Tata Sons and Citigroup Global Markets Mauritius Pvt. acquired the 8.65mn shares from Daimler AG.
Daimler AG had sold its 5.34% stake or 25.5mn equity shares in Tata Motors through a block deal on Tuesday morning, the deal was done at an average price of Rs750 per share on the BSE. Through this share sale, Daimler AG managed to raise Rs19.12bn.