KARACHI, June 29: Cotton market on Wednesday showed steady trend as spinners remained conspicuous by their absence making arrangement to lift the recently purchased lint from the TCP godowns, brokers said.

Spinners and mills have purchased well over 0.1m bales of lint from the TCP on Monday’s auction in their moping operations in an apparent effort to build up a strong supply position to meet the rising demand of the Pakistani textiles on the world markets, they said.

“The mill scramble for the fresh supplies may well be had from the fact that exports figure of textiles during the last 11 months has already close to the $8 billion mark and may surpass it after end-June figures are compiled,” analysts said. “The strong mill buying against their firm import orders is based on this fact.”

They said Zero-rated tax regime in the new budget for the textile sector to boost exports to a maximum possible limits has reinforced the spinner confidence of setting up new export record based on sufficient and easy supplies of the lint.

An idea of firm future market outlook may be had from the fact that local prices were not influenced bearishly in sympathy with sharp fall in New York cotton futures, they said.

Although unsold stocks with the ginners, notably of fine varieties may not be on the higher side of the market estimate, in any case they could hardly prove a market factor, some others said.

Some of the leading ginners from the upper Sindh and southern Punjab cotton belt are still holding on to stray stocks for a better price, but their pre-determined level of Rs2,500 per maund now appears to be a remote possibility in the backdrop of volatile world markets and persistent TCP auctions.

Meanwhile, private sector exporters maintained their physical shipment dates against the previous signed export deals and shipped 40,700 bales in March and 32,035 bales in April to make to total to 0.434m bales against foreign sales of 0.732n bales, according to official figures.

In the absence of physical business, spot rates were firmly held at the last close but on the other hand New York cotton futures fell by 1.40 and 1.37 cents per lb for both the matured July and the ruling October contracts at 49.35 and 52.26 cents per lb respectively.