The Hindu Business Line : Sugary attraction

SOME institutional investors have been slowly accumulating shares of sugar mill Balrampur Chini since last week. According to a market source, the company's top officials had made detailed presentations to investors recently. The source said the presentations had evoked a good response.

A dealer with one institutional investor said the company was expected to show good numbers for the fourth quarter of 2003-04. He considered the share relatively risk-free with limited downside.

The Balrampur Chini stock closed nearly 3 per cent higher at Rs 323 per share on the BSE. While 26,056 shares were traded on the BSE, 22,196 shares changed hands on the NSE.

Gas-fired performance

STOCK exchange newcomer Petronet LNG was on fire on Monday after investors rushed to buy its shares on news that it had begun commercial supply of re-gasified LNG from its recently-commissioned Dahej terminal.

According to the market grapevine, a big domestic broking firm has been bullish on the stock for a few days now. Even though the stock had closed 2 per cent lower than its IPO price of Rs 15 per share on debut on March 26, investor sentiment seems to have reversed now.

A source said the local broker has accumulated more than a crore shares of the fledgling LNG supplier.

The stock hit its highest ever at Rs 20.10 today before settling to Rs 19.04, up 12.6 per cent from its previous close. More than 1.5 crore shares were traded on the BSE and nearly 1.9 crore shares were traded on the NSE.

Are the gains concrete?

WHILE cement companies have been having a decent run on the stock exchanges since last week, some investors are beginning to get a little worried about their performance in the past year.

According to a dealer, even though construction season is reaching the peak, March shipments by cement companies have shown only a modest rise year on year. However, this rise was recorded on low despatches of March 2003, when several units were shut down on account of uncertainty over introduction of value-added tax.

Production was stalled for almost 15-20 days last year. According to a dealer, delays in some Government projects such as the Golden Quadrilateral road project may also adversely affect the prospects of cement companies.

ACC shares closed marginally lower at Rs 263.35 and Gujarat Ambuja was almost flat at Rs 306.65. Grasim, however, rose 1.3 per cent to end the day at Rs 1,155 per share and L&T was up 3.7 per cent at Rs 608.80.

Dinesh Narayanan

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