January 17, 2002	Thursday	Ziqa’ad 2, 1422

KARACHI, Jan 16: Cotton market on Wednesday passed through another briskly traded session as spinners and mills continued to cover positions against forward sales of cotton yarn.

“With New York cotton future stable around 36 cents per lb, spinners are back in the market in a big way, of course, after having a look on the export parity level of cotton yarn”, dealers said.

Other contributory positive development is the pick up in world demand for the new year stock building by the foreign buyers and lower offered prices being the most attractive bait, they said.

As the fears of war between Pakistan and India are being gradually receding owing to the US mediation, foreign buyers have started opening fresh letters of credit for the quarter ending March 31, 2002.

The current revival of mill demand owes its origin in the spate of fresh enquiries from the foreign buyers of Pakistani textiles as well as cotton yarn, brokers said.

“For the second session in a row big-lot business was recorded as the leading spinner groups were in no mood to take even a technical breather”, they added.

Three deals comprising 5,000 bales each changed hands between Rs1,675 on the lower side and Rs1,800 per maund on the higher side.

Exporters are also in the market, although they are keeping their presence in a low-key. Most of them are buyers of inferior lots around Rs1,200 and Rs1,250 against their forward sales. Leading among them, however, are making stray purchases of fine lots.

But there is no evidence of TCP presence in the market during the last couple of sessions, although current levels are claimed to be fairly competitive keeping in view the future export outlook, dealers said.

Despite still to go a long way to sell a large unsold stock of 2 million bales, ginners are a bit happy over the revival of mill demand irrespective of the fact that prices are not that attractive as most of them have purchased phutti at much higher levels.

Ready offtake was active as till late in the evening another 25,000 bales changed hands as under:

SINDH TYPE: 500 bales, Bucheri at Rs1,600, 2,500 bales, Gothki, Dharki, Mirpur Mathelo and some other stations at Rs1,740 to Rs1,750.

PUNJAB VARIETY: 5,000 bales, Rahimyar Khan at Rs1,725 to Rs1,800, 5,000 bales, Khanpur at Rs1,725 to Rs1,800, 5,000 bales, Sadiqabad at Rs1,675 to Rs1,750, 200 bales, Sahiwal at Rs1,200, 200 bales, Burewala at Rs1,250, and 1,000 bales, D.G.Khan at Rs1,600.