Smokestacks are back, oust ICE from turnover list

Old economy stocks managed to claw back into the list of top ten stocks by turnover, displacing as many as five information, communication and entertainment (ICE) stocks.

The Tata Steel share is at the fourth position with a turnover of Rs 60,381 crore, State Bank of India sixth (Rs 49,242 crore), Tata Motors eighth (Rs 34,352 crore), HPCL ninth (Rs 33,604 crore) and SAIL tenth (Rs 30,073 crore).

These shares have replaced four software and one media stocks: Aftek Infosys, Polaris Software, VisualSoft Technologies, Wipro and Zee Telefilms.

The Digital GlobalSoft share slipped from the third position in 2002 to fifth in 2003, while the rank of Mastek, another software stock, moved down from fourth to seventh.

Meanwhile., as a result of this reordering, the share of the top ten companies in the total cash market turnover (BSE and NSE combined) has declined to 45.4 per cent in the calendar year 2003 from 54.9 per cent in 2002.

This is despite a 34.1 per cent rise in total turnover to Rs 12,82,301 crore in 2003 from Rs 9,55,902 crore in 2002.

This substantiates the fact that the current boom in stock market is not concentrated in frontline stocks but is spread among mid-cap and small-cap stocks too.

The group-wise classification shows that the turnover of group-A stocks increased by 41.3 per cent to Rs 11,64,027 crore (Rs 8,23,569 crore), while that of group-B1 stocks doubled (106.2 per cent) to Rs 80,053 crore (Rs 38,823 crore) and that of group-B2 stocks shot up by 95.7 per cent to Rs 5,346 crore (Rs 2,736 crore).