KARACHI: The stock market ended its seven-session losing streak on Wednesday before the budget announcement, buoyed by optimism about the government’s privatisation plan and debt rollover talks with China.

Ahsan Mehanti of Arif Habib Corporation said equities showed recovery after Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb affirmed at the Economic Survey 2023-24 presser that state-owned enterprises’ privatisation would be vigorously pursued, a plan to negotiate China debt restructuring would be implemented while the talks with the Interna­tional Monetary Fund were moving in the right direction to stabilise the economy.

Reacting to the budgetary proposal on Capital Gains Tax (CGT), Mr Meh­anti expected the stock market to remain under pressure owing to the CGT being raised to 45pc for non-filers and 15pc for short-term investors.

Topline Securities Ltd said the market rebounded after seven sessions of losses. Companies like Pak­i­stan Petroleum Ltd, Syst­ems Ltd, Engro Corpor­ation, Pakistan Oilfield, and PSO collectively contributed 139 points to the index. Conversely, the National Bank of Pakistan, Bank Alfalah, Colgate Palmolive, Lucky Cement, and HabibMetro Bank wiped out 110 points.

As a result, the benchmark index closed at 72,797.43 points after adding 207.94 points or 0.29pc on a day-on-day basis.

However, the overall trading volume dipped 21.32 per cent to 293.08 million shares. The traded value also fell by 9.52pc to Rs10.54bn day-on-day.

Stocks contributing significantly to the traded volume included K-Ele­ctric (28.44m shares), PIA Hold­ing Co (27.44m shares), Wor­ldCall Tele­com (20.51m shares), Pervez Ahmed Co (16.51m shares) and Cner­gyico PK (9.51m shares).

The shares registering the most significant incre­ases in their share prices in absolute terms were Pak Engineering (Rs49.85), Sapphire Textile (Rs24.00), Meh­mood Tex­tile (Rs23.74), Pakistan Hotels Developers Ltd (Rs18.87) and Mari Petrole­um(Rs12.03).

The companies registering significant decr­eases in their share prices in absolute terms were Unilever Foods (Rs75.00), PIA Hol­ding Co (Rs34.43), Ismail Industries (Rs28.74), Colg­ate-Palm­olive (Rs25.97) and Fateh Industries (Rs12.59).

Foreign investors indul­ged in aggressive profit-taking as they offloaded shares worth $2.37m.

Published in Dawn, June 13th, 2024