KARACHI: Steady conditions prevailed on the cotton market on Saturday as buying remained restricted due to slow offtake of cotton yarn and piling up of yarn stocks with spinning mills.

The market generally remained easy owing to lack of interest from spinners and ginners unwilling to part ways with their quality cotton stocks.

The higher price quoted by ginners for quality cotton has restricted trading activity as spinners are reluctant to pay beyond a certain price line.

The big spinning groups, on the other hand are reported to be keen on imports of cotton.

Reports from cotton fields suggest that the quality of phutti (seed-cotton) is deteriorating fast and textile mills are not ready to lift poor quality cotton from ginners.

Chairman Karachi Cotton Brokers’ Forum Naseem Usman said that currently the local as well as world’s leading cotton markets are under the grip of a low level recession as demand and prices of cotton are low.

The New York cotton market is faced with dollar parity and moved lower while Chinese and Indian cotton markets gave a mixed trend.

According to private estimates, the cotton production would not be more than 10.5 million bales and this would mean that the country will have to import at least 4m bales to meet the consumption demand of 15m bales by local mills.

The Karachi Cotton Association (KCA) spot rates were unchanged at Rs8,800 per maund.

The following deals were reported to have changed hands on ready counter: 400 bales from Shahdadpur were done at Rs8,350; 1,400 bales, Khairpur Mirus, at Rs8,600; 1,200 bales, Saleh Pat, at Rs8,750 to Rs8,775; 3,000 bales, Rahimyar Khan, at Rs8,050 to Rs9,050; 1,000 bales, Khanpur, at Rs9,000 to Rs9,050; 2,000 bales, D G Khan, at Rs9,000; 800 bales, Yazman, at Rs8,600; 1,600 bales, Haroonabad, at Rs8,500; 600 bales, Layyah, at Rs8,450 and 1,000 bales from Sadiqabad were done at Rs9,000.

Published in Dawn, November 25th, 2018