Dear Clients,
Stock Market remained closed slightly negative today. Covid cases have been north of 5000 for 4 out of past 5 days, with improvement witnessed yesterday. However, government officials – Dr Faisal Sultan & Asad Umar – have voiced their concerns that SOPs are not being followed & the hospitalization levels are increasing day by day to alarming levels of infection rate. Hence, investors are anxious over the infection rate & number of cases in the short term despite strong medium term outlook.
KSE-100 closed down by 208.43 points to 44,978.05 levels with overall market volume of 503.5mn shares traded. Highest activity was recorded in WTL (+6.29%) with 72.7mn shares traded, TRG (+5.69%) with 42.17mn shares and GGL (+6.53%) with 38.8mn shares traded.
Key earnings announcement included Panther Tyre’s EPS 1.47 (driven by 54% sales growth & GM of 16% vs last year’s 10%), PTCL (EPS 0.32 driven by margins improvement to 27% vs 24% last year) & Kohat Cement ‘s EPS of 5.27% (160% sales growth & 26% Gross Margins). Similarly, Dandot cement announced increasing authorized capital from Rs 1b to Rs 5b to beef up balance sheet for future operational plans.
Positivity was predominantly witnessed in TRG, GGL & GGGL and other small caps. Whereas, Refinery, Steel, Autos, Netsol/AVN closed negative. Going forward the direction once again is going to oscillate between direction of the Covid cases & earnings announcements. We feel market would remain flattish until covid cases take a direction.
KASB Research
