Metal company stocks were under selling pressure on Wednesday despite bullish bandwagon of markets. The index emerges top laggard after pharma and IT stocks. All the Nifty metal stocks were in the red with exception of MOIL. Heavyweights Tata Steel, Adani Enterprises dragged the sector most to emerge as the top bear of the day.
On the global front, Copper prices continues to fall as concerns of weak demand from top consumer China were stoked by the country’s disappointing factory data. Three-month copper on the London Metal Exchange fell 0.7% to $9,451 a tonne.
Benchmark indices gained 0.5 percent and trading at day’s high level with Nifty above 17200 during early trading deals on Wednesday.
At around 10:40 AM, the Sensex was up 104.99 points or 0.18% at 57,657.38, and the Nifty was up 29.90 points or 0.17% at 17,162.10. Nifty Metal was trading at 5,624.50 down 90.10 points or 1.58%, after opening higher at 5,737.30 and touching a high of 5,739.50 and low of 5,612.55.
Tata Steel was the top underperformer plummeting over 2% followed by NMDC, SAIL and Vedanta diving by 2% each.
Stocks like NALCO, Hindalco were under pressure dipped more than 1.5% each to drag the index.
Jindal Steel, JSW Steel, Welspun Corp fell over 1% each. Heavyweights APL Apollo, Adani Enterprises also joined bears to tumble more than 0.5%.
On the upside, MOIL was the only gainer to support the sector by adding some marginal gains.
Indian metal companies are set to announce their August 2021 production data this week onwards.
Further, the combined Index of Eight Core Industries stood at 134 in July 2021, which increased by 9.4% (provisional) as compared to the Index of July 2020. Coal production (weight: 10.33 per cent) increased by 18.7% in July,2021 over July,2020 while Steel production (weight: 17.92 per cent)increased by 9.3% in July, 2021 over July, 2020.
