KARACHI, March 10: The cotton market on Friday resisted fresh decline but physical business remained at low ebb as leading spinners were again conspicuous by their absence.

However, some of the brokers reported stray business in inferior lots from the central Sindh ginneries as ginners tried to clear the backlog of odd lots around Rs2,450 or slightly above.

But ginners from the upper Sindh cotton belt, some of whom still hold long unsold positions, are not inclined to lower their asking prices below Rs2,550 per maund because of quality of the lint, brokers said.

They said that upper Sindh and southern Punjab ginners were known for producing quality and contamination-free lint and bulk of the unsold stock of about 1.5m bales was lying with them.

Market sources failed to pinpoint reasons behind the falling mill demand despite the fact that most of them were said to be fully booked for the next quarter ending June 30, 2006.

The motive behind the calculated spinner buying is that they do not want to fuel price flare-up in the backdrop of short crop, which may disturb their export parity level against the already signed forward deals, they added.

According to them textile exports had already touched a record level of well over 20 per cent during the first half of the current fiscal and may rise further as during the current quarter owing to competitive prices being offered by the local producers.

Meanwhile, reports coming from the yarn market indicate that the ready off-take by the ancillary industry is fairly steady, which in turn is keeping spinner inventories at the lower levels.

It was perhaps in this background that official spot rates were held unchanged at the overnight levels amid slow

trading.

New York cotton futures on the other hand recovered from the previous lows and were quoted higher by 0.52 and 0.31 cents at 53.62 and 54.17 cents per lb for both the maturing March and the ruling May contracts respectively.