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Sensex dives 80 points, closes at 3322.17

The Sensex did not escape the slump in stock indices across the Asian region, reflecting a contagion effect primarily due to the resignation of Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto.

The BSE-30 Sensitive Index of the Bombay Stock Exchange shed 80 points as foreign funds adopted a bearish outlook and offloaded in key counters.

According to marketmen, Indian scrips at the global depository receipts market showed a downward trend with shares of only five companies witnessing an uptrend. 14 scrips lost ground, while 46 were unchanged.

However, others insisted that today's fall was a technical correction as brokers squared up the outstanding long positions built over the past week.

In the foreign exchange market, the rupee lost six paise against the dollar on demand from corporates and short covering by banks. The Indian currency closed at Rs 42.58/60 as against the previous close of Rs 42.52/54.

The Sensex opened at 3426.83 points, touched the high and low of 3461.12 and 3320.11 points respectively and ended lower at 3322.17 points as compared to 3401.74 points, showing a net loss of 79.57 points.

The BSE-100 index came down by 27.31 points to 1459.37 points as against the last close of 1486.68 points. The BSE-200 index fell by 4.86 points to 332.36 points as from the last closing of 337.22 points.

The Dollex slumped by 2.27 points to 129.93 points as against 132.20 points last Friday.

The total turnover on the BOLT network was Rs 10.67 billion and 45.2 million shares were traded.

Tobacco gaint ITC recorded the highest turnover of Rs 2.02 billion followed by Satyam Computers(Rs 1.84 billion), SBI (Rs 1.32 billion), Reliance (Rs 817 million), Pentafour (Rs 483.6 million), Tata Tea (Rs 332.9 million), Castrol (Rs 290.6 million), Zee Telefilms (Rs 284.1 million), Infosys (Rs 208.1 million), Telco (Rs 174.4 million), Tisco (Rs 172.4 million), L&T (Rs 159.7 million), Hindustan Lever Limited (Rs 153.6 million), Bajaj Auto (Rs 122.4 million) and BHEL (Rs 101.2 million).

In the B1 group, Bata India registered Rs 37.1 million, BFL (Rs 33.3 million), Silverline (Rs 26.7 million), DSQ Software (Rs 16.4 million) and Mico (Rs 15 million).

UNI