KARACHI, March 24: Trading activity on the cotton market failed to pick up as spinners remained conspicuous by their absence leaving ginners guessing about their disinterestedness.

The interesting feature of the cotton trade was that the private sector exporters had physically shipped 20,000 bales of low quality lint to India out of the total exports of 0.139m bales up to March 15, said a leading exporter.

Pakistan’s cotton trade is free both for import and export without duty in an effort to ensure competitive supplies to the textile sector to maintain steady outflow of textiles, he added.

But cotton analysts said after having imported large quantities of lint from various sources to make up the local shortage, spinners and mills are sitting pretty comfortable on their stocks, keeping ginners at their toes all the time.

Bulk of the lint, about 2m bales plus, from India during the last two months has changed supply and demand outlook putting pressure on the ginners to lower their asking prices, they added.

“Spinners are not worried over the rebound staged by the New York cotton futures after having fallen sharply lower by 16 cents per lb during the last couple of sessions as most of them were already close to their annual consumption demand,” market sources said.

Incidentally, both the ruling May and July contracts did not breach the barrier of 70 cents per lb and the Monday’s rebound reflects that speculative forces are again inclined to push them further higher, they added.

Official spot rates, therefore, did not show any change and were firmly held at the last level of Rs3,300 per maund.

Mill ready off-take was on the lower side amounting to about 3,000 bales, all from the Sindh ginneries as under: 1,200 bales, Shahdadpur at Rs3,400 and 1,000 bales, Khairpur at Rs3,350.