Nifty reclaims 8600; metals rally post China GDP data

Moneycontrol Bureau

10:40am Punj Lloyd shares in demand

Engineering major Punj Lloyd said it sold its entire 17.74 percent stake in Global Health Pvt Ltd, which owns Gurgaon-based Medanta Medicity hospital among others, to an arm of Singapore's state-owned investment company Temasek Holdings.

No financial details of the deal were, however, disclosed. "The company has sold it's entire shareholding of 8,601,979 equity shares in Global Health Pvt Ltd (GHPL), amounting to 17.74 percent of the issued equity share capital of GHPL, to Dunearn Investments (Mauritius) Pte Limited, (Dunearn) on Monday," Punj Lloyd said in a filing to BSE. The stock gained 1.5 percent.

10:20am FII View

Bhuvnesh Singh, Barclays says the Q3FY15 earnings season is off to a positive start with 6 out of 11 BSE-100 companies reporting 'beats' on earnings consensus estimates. “However, the FY15 EPS growth rate estimate for BSE-100 declined to 13.1 percent, down 300 basis points since the end of the last earnings season,” he adds.

The ex-energy earnings growth estimate stands at 17.1 percent. Among sectors, energy and materials have witnessed downgrades of 292 bps and 161 bps respectively since the start of the current earnings season. Other sectors have seen modest changes.

10:00am Market Check

Equity benchmarks climbed further in morning trade today with the Nifty racing towards 8600 level supported by banking & financial and metals stocks. The broader markets too participated in an uptrend as the BSE Midcap and Smallcap indices gained 0.8 percent each.

The 30-share BSE Sensex rose 160.87 points to 28422.88 and the 50-share NSE Nifty climbed 48.65 points to 8599.35. Nearly three shares advanced for every share declining on the Bombay Stock Exchange.

Shares of Tata Steel and Hindalco Industries rallied more than 2 percent after better than expected China GDP data. The world's second largest economy grew 7.3 percent in the fourth quarter of last year against forecasts of 7.2 percent. Sesa Sterlite advanced 1.6 percent.

Major banks like State Bank of India and Axis Bank surged 1.8 percent each after RBI issued revised guidelines on banks' base rates yesterday. ICICI Bank was up 0.8 percent and HDFC Bank gained 0.4 percent.

Shares of ITC, Infosys, Reliance Industries and ONGC gained 0.5-1 percent whereas HUL shed 1.5 percent after reporting 3 percent volume growth in Q3FY15. GAIL lost 2 percent on profit booking. L&T, M&M, Hero Motocorp, Sun Pharma, Bajaj Auto and BHEL were marginally in the red.