The Hindu Business Line : Infy hits 52-week high as IT counters sizzle

BOTH the US and the domestic markets finished in positive territory last week thanks to solid buying support. As the drop in oil prices eased concern, the US benchmarks -

Standard & Poor's 500 Index and Dow Jones Industrial Average - registered their fifth weekly gains. Nokia Oyj's, which is Texas Instruments' largest client, better-than-expected third quarter sales bolstered the sentiment for tech companies.

For the week, the S&P-500 advanced 0.9 per cent to 1123.92 and the Dow Industrials added 0.5 per cent to 10,313.07. The Nasdaq Composite Index jumped 2.7 per cent to 1894.31.

Led by FMCG counters - HLL and ITC, the domestic markets extended their gaining streak to the third successive week despite jump in the inflation rate to a new four-year high at 8.33 per cent. While the BSE Sensex shot up by 2.90 per cent to close at a four-month high of 5370.00, the NSE's S&P CNX Nifty gained 2.12 per cent at 1668.75.

Tracking Nasdaq, Indian infotech ADRs witnessed sharp gains. Leading the pack was Infosys Technology which registered its 52-week high at $55.6 on September 9. It, however, ended the week at $53.85 against the previous week close of $54.33.

Apart from the Nasdaq impact, reports that Wipro Technologies, the global IT services division of Wipro Ltd, has licensed the 1394 AVLink IP Cores and 1,394 Software Stack to MediaTek Inc, Taiwan boosted the sentiment further for IT counters.

While Wipro closed at $18.19 ($17.6), Satyam jumped to $23.05 ($21.46).

However, telecommunication ADRs - VSNL and MTNL - were not that fortunate as both ended last week in negative territory.

Tariff war in India for telephone services seemed to have affected the sentiment in these counters. MTNL, in fact, will cut its mobile tariffs in New Delhi and Mumbai by as much as 58 per cent starting October 2.

VSNL announced, after the closing hours of trading in the US, that it had entered into a partnership with Speedera Networks, a leading global provider of on-demand distributed application and content delivery services, to provide Internet infrastructure services for the Indian market.

Dr. Reddy's Lab, which was battered down until recently, was able to trace the recovery path. The company's ADR closed firm at $16.86 (15.7).

Internet counters Sify and Rediff.com also posted handsome gains with the former jumping close to 18 per cent at $5.4 ($4.579) and the latter ending at $7.58 ($7.40).

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