KARACHI, June 15: Quietly steady trading conditions prevailed on the cotton market on Wednesday as leading spinners and mills remained busy in the paper work for the TCP’s June 17 auction.

The TCP will offer another 60,000 bales of both fine and low-mic lots of lint to both the foreign and the local buyers on Friday and indications are that it would be able to sell the entire lot in line with its reference price of well over Rs2,400 per kg, brokers predict.

“Spinners and mills are out to grab the floating stock lying with the TCP even at the higher rates as they hate to go for imports in the presence of quality local stuff”, they said.

According to market sources the post-WTO regime has opened new export outlets for the textile industry and those who still hold short positions against their forward sales of made-ups and yarn are willing to buy the local lint at the sellers’ option.

Although the revaluation of the rupee against the euro has affected textile exports to the EU, whose annual intake is billed around $3.5 billion, the size of the orders, which is much higher than a year ago, is expected to marginalize the larger impact of the weakness of the euro, they said.

Well over five dozens local spinners and mills participate in the weekly TCP auctions and try to buy all the lots even at a slightly higher price, while their weaker links supplement their stock position from the local market.

Ginners said while most of them have cleared their unsold stock of inferior and odd lots, modest lots of fine variety are still lying in their godowns and They intend to sell it around Rs2,500 per maund or slightly below this rate.

“As the mill demand reflects prices could touch the Rs2,500 mark during the next month well before the new crop arrivals and the TCP stops its weekly auction around August 14”, they said.

The local market was not influenced by the progressive recovery being staged by the New York cotton futures as official rates were again held unchanged at the last levels.

But on the other hand the New York cotton futures rose further by 0.70 and 0.59 cents per lb for the maturing July and forward October contracts at 47.60 and 49.88 cents respectively.

Ready business was dull, although some of local mills managed to buy stray lots from the ginners for Karachi delivery.