Mumbai, July 6: The GDR market witnessed a lacklustre trade during the week ended July 3, with the Skindia GDR index moving in a narrow band to finally close at 82.65 on July 3 against its previous week's close of 82.03 recorded on June 26.

Active participation of FII investors at the local markets, saw about $8 billion funds flow into the domestic bourses, with the net effect that the 64 GDRs gained an average 1.07 per cent and on the contrary their underlying shares gained 2.74 per cent. Meanwhile the Skindia GDR index has gained 0.18 per cent as compared to a 5.02 per cent increase in the BSE-30 sensitive index.

This has resulted in the Skindia GDR index premium sharply fall by 53.46 per cent to 21.66 per cent on July 3, from an all time high of 33.24 per cent on June 13.

GDR's of Videocon International, however, continued to be traded at a premium of 66.93 per cent against its underlying share price of Rs 30.00, J K Corp also quoted at a premium of 62.22 per cent against its domestic share price of Rs 22.05 and Crompton Greaves was traded at a premium of 56.80 per cent against the domestic price of Rs 78.00. Reflecting the optimistic sentiment built up at the steel industry counter, GDR of SAIL registered a gain of 19.44 per cent to close at $ 10.75 on July 3. For the same period the other gainers : Ashok Leyland was up by 11.54 per cent at $ 7.25 and Century Textiles at $ 64 registered a gain of 10.34 per cent.

However, Grasim Industry's global depository receipts slipped by 9.60 per cent to close at $ 13.00, Indo Rama closed at $ 5.50 to record a loss of 8.33 per cent and IPCL closed at $ 13.75 to record a loss of 6.02 per cent.Analysing the performance of the power sector GDRs, a Skindia Finance release stated, 'The GDRs and the underlying shares from the power sector have underperformed the markets since May 29.

GDRs have grown an average 7.11 per cent as compared to a rise of 14.52 per cent in the Skindia GDR index.

A study on the private placement of global depository receipts under rule 144 A, highlights the fact that till 1996, $ 28.41 billion has been raised globally by 350 corporates, through depositary receipts. Of this, 61 Indian Corporates (including Bharat Hotels, Jagatjit Ind, Pentafour Software) have raised $ 6.22 billion which represents 20.90 per cent of the total funds raised. Thus India has floated the largest number of GDR issues, followed by Mexico with 29 and the United Kingdom with 27. Of this the largest number of issues were made by the banking sector with 35, followed by utilities with 32 and chemicals with 18. In terms of amount raised, the banking sector tops again raising $ 4,028.42 million, followed by utilities with $ 2,660.56 million and telecom $ 2,620.91 million.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.