Islamabad, 8 January 2022 (TDI): The Pakistani Stock Exchange took a major hit among rising uncertainties with the Omicron variant of COVID-19. Many stocks and indexes were in the negative with investors staying away from big investments.
Pakistan’s current account has seen a widening deficit for a while with analytics predicting that it will represent 2.2% of the countries GDP in fiscal year 21/22, along with rising uncertainty with the Omicron variant has brought Pakistan’s stock market to its knees.
Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) benchmark KSE-100 index dropped from 45,407 points to 45,082 points over the previous session. A loss of 325 points or 0.72%.
The KSE-100 share-index opened negative and stayed there for the remainder of the day on Friday. With the lowest point recorded to be 45,021.32 levels. Many sectors saw their stock prices drop.
These include technology which saw a negative of 116 points, cement saw a 78-point decline. Banks and textile each lost 22 and 21 points each. While oil marketing companies saw a decline of 27 points. Dealers speculate the market is likely to stay affected as long as COVID-19 cases continue and imports outweigh exports.
“Trade deficit year-on-year widened by a sharp 106.4 percent to $25.478 billion which was driven largely by a nearly triple increase in imports compared to exports.” -Arif Habib Limited
Darson Securities said trading remained under pressure with the widening deficit and an increasing rise in the COVID-19 cases across the country.
“The negative development about government’s debt and liabilities increasing 5.9 percent in the first five months of the current fiscal year and 14.4 percent during the last 12 months (Nov 2020-Nov 2021) and gloomy trend in global markets also put its share to fracture the value of shares.”
Volumes dropped to 345.3 million shares or by 20.1%. On the other hand, traded value increased by 28.7%. Covid-19 has adversely affected the entire global economy and supply chains, disrupting the businesses.
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