MULTAN: Cotton trading on Monday remained lackluster due to the lack of buying interest from spinners who preferred to stay on the sidelines.

Cotton broker Syed Muddabir Shah said that with the start of holy month of Ramazan, the spinning mills are faced with load-shedding of 12 hours.

“The spinning mills which have no gas connections are badly affected due to load-shedding; most of these mills are from Punjab,” he said.

The spinning mills were now selling their imported as well as local cotton stocks, he said, adding that the arrival of cotton from the new crop has been started in Sindh and 400 maunds (1 maund — around 37 kilograms) were sold in Badin on Monday.

He said the new cotton season will probably start from June and a couple of ginning factories will become functional in Sindh.

People who have stocks of cotton from the last season were now getting a reasonable price of their product as the prices were between Rs6,000 to Rs6,200 when they made purchases compared to Rs6,800 to Rs7,000 at present, he said.

He said that an unsold stock of about 190,000 bales of old crop is available which will be cleared after the season starts.

Although the cotton sowing process in Sindh has been completed, it is still under way in Punjab and farmers from Bahawalpur, Rajanpur, Dera Ghazi Khan and Rahim Yar Khan are continuing the sowing.

The Karachi Cotton Asso­ciation left its spot rates unchanged on Monday. Major deals on the ready counter were: 100 bales from Haroonabad at Rs7,200 per maund (credit on 60 days), 400 bales from Rahim Yar Khan at Rs6,925, and 200 bales from Vehari at Rs6,800.

Published in Dawn, May 30th, 2017