KARACHI, Oct 17: Trading activity failed to pick up on the cotton market on Thursday as leading spinners remained conspicuous by their absence throughout the session for unknown reasons.

Barring a big-lot deal of 2,000 bales, most of the deals reported went to the credit of some local spinners who generally operate on day-to-day basis because of liquidity problems.

Dealers failed to pinpoint sudden withdrawal of mill demand, which is an unusual development at this time of the season. Some say spinners are awaiting the resumption of first picking in the major crop areas of southern and central Punjab.

Some others claim spinners are assessing the damage to standing crop in some areas of the Punjab caused by the pest attack through their own survey teams before resuming their seasonal buying.

Some others say both leading spinners and mills are taking a technical breather to have a fair idea of their inventories and the annual consumption requirements in the changed export priorities.

“After a week of hectic mill buying, the sudden pause in their operations has sent shock waves among the ginners and growers”, says a leading broker “it could be a tactical move to push prices down from the current level after having slowed down their daily purchases”.

However, ginners held on to their positions and did not lower their asking prices but rather raised them for the Punjab lint, which in turn has a negative impact on the ready offtake.

Market sources said the venue of physical trading has now been shifted to the Punjab ginneries in search of fine lots of higher count export quality cotton yarn.

On the export front, private sector exporters registered export contracts for 1,176 bales sold to Indonesia with the Export Promotion Bureau on Oct 15, 2002. The total foreign sales so far amounted to 28,682 bales.

Official spot rates remained pegged at the last levels, although some of the deals in the ready section were done above them.

New York cotton futures on the other hand remained under pressure and fell further by 0.46 and 0.47 cents per lb at 43.58 and 45.98 cents for both the ruling December and the forward March settlements respectively.

Ready business was light as till late in the evening about 4,000 bales changed hands as under:

SINDH VARIETY: 400 bales, Mirpurkhas at Rs1,950, 200 bales, Shahdadpur at Rs1,955, 200 bales, Tando Adam at Rs1,955, and 200 bales, Kot Diji at Rs2,025.