Indian markets will track trends emerging from India's corporate quarterly earning season in the coming week, dealers said. So far, the third-quarter earnings data has been mixed. Earlier in the week, Nasdaq-listed Infosys reported net profit grew by 33 percent to 16.41 billion rupees (338 million dollars) in the three months to December but gave a cautious full-year guidance. On Thursday, India's largest software exporter TCS reported a lower-than-expected quarterly profit rise of 1.57 percent to 13.52 billion rupees (276 million dollars), hit by the global economic slowdown.
Focus will also remain on the fraud-hit IT outsourcing giant Satyam as its new board seeks to chart the company's recovery. The stock has fallen nearly 85 percent since its founder-chairman B. Ramalinga Raju said earlier this month company accounts had been falsified by more than one billion dollars.
For the week to January 16, the benchmark 30-share Sensex index fell 0.88 percent or 82.88 points to 9,406.47. "The markets had opened strong following the positive move by the US government to rescue the Bank of America. Positive trends across Europe and US index futures aided sentiment," said Alex Mathew, head of research at brokerage Geojit Financial.
Earlier this month, India eased foreign borrowing for real estate and certain other companies and allowed additional liquidity for non-banking financial firms to boost growth. The package also allowed state administrations to borrow up to 300 billion rupees (6.2 billion dollars) to meet extra expenditures and fund infrastructure projects.
Since October, the Reserve Bank of India has reduced the repo - the rate at which the central bank lends to commercial banks - by 350 basis points from nine percent to 5.5 percent. For the year 2008, overseas funds sold Indian stocks worth 13.13 billion dollars for the year compared with a net investment of over 17 billion dollars in 2007.
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