Mumbai: Indian stocks climbed yesterday, erasing an earlier decline. Bharti Airtel Ltd led gains after Zain said it's finalising an agreement to sell assets to the nation's largest mobile-phone operator.
Bharti advanced 2.2 per cent. Hero Honda Motors Ltd soared to a record after the biggest motorcycle maker's board said it will consider paying a special interim dividend on March 30.
"There is more confidence in Indian companies now," said D.K. Aggarwal, who manages funds for wealthy individuals as chairman of SMC Wealth Management Services Ltd in New Delhi. "Many Indian companies have the potential to become multi- nationals. This will boost the confidence of foreign investors."
The Bombay Stock Exchange's Sensitive Index, or Sensex, gained 107.83, or 0.6 per cent, to 17,558.85, erasing an earlier drop of as much as 0.4 per cent. The S&P CNX Nifty Index on the National Stock Exchange rose 0.7 per cent to 5,260.40. The BSE 200 Index increased 0.5 per cent to 2,193.17. The gauges may have been more volatile yesterday as future options for March, traded on the Nifty index, expired.
Bharti, India's biggest mobile phone company, increased 2.2 per cent to 314.4 rupees.
An agreement to buy the African assets of Zain, the Kuwait-based mobile-phone company, will be signed "within days", Zain said in a statement yesterday.
The purchase would be the largest overseas acquisition by an Indian company since 2007.
Tata Motors, India's biggest truckmaker and owner of Jaguar Land Rover, slid 1.9 per cent to Rs725.2.
The Reserve Bank of India increased borrowing costs by a quarter percentage point on March 19, raising the benchmark reverse repurchase rate to 3.5 per cent and the repurchase rate to 5 per cent, to contain inflation and reduce the risk of a hard landing. .
Overseas investors bought a net Rs2.71 billion of Indian stocks on March 22, taking their total purchases of the equities this year to Rs161.1 billion, the Securities and Exchange Board of India said.
