Indian equity markets continued to trend downwards during the previous two hours of trade. Apart from the FMCG sector, no other sectors were trading in green.
At the time of writing, the BSE Sensex was down by 70 points and NSE-Nifty was down by 26 points. BSE Mid Cap index and BSE Small Cap index were trading lower by 0.41% and 0.47%. The rupee was trading at 54.13 to the US dollar.
Software shares were generally trading in red with the exception of Wipro, HCL Tech, Oracle Financial Services and NIIT Ltd. Infosys announced to the Bombay Stock Exchange yesterday that it has expanded its presence in Latin America by opening up a new delivery centre for its business process outsourcing subsidiary, Infosys BPO, in San Jose, Costa Rica. Initially the centre would concentrate on providing key services to Procter & Gamble in the areas of strategic sourcing and procurement. Going forward, Infosys expects the centre to provide entire range of BPO services for its global clients in the areas of human resource management, analytics, legal and finance processes along with marketing and supply chain management. The investment in Costa Rica is considered to be a strategic one made by Infosys keeping in mind the growth happening in Latin American markets. BPO operations in South Asia do not have the edge in servicing clients based in LatAm, given the lack of proficiency in Spanish and Portuguese, the two major business languages in the LatAm region. Infosys's shares were trading down by 2%.
Only three automobile shares, Eicher Motors, Maharashtra Scooters and Tube Investments were trading in green during the previous two hours of trade. According to a leading news daily, Tata Motors is reportedly looking to enter the low-cost car segment in the European market by tying up with Qoros Auto Company, which is a joint venture( JV) between Israel Corporation and China based Chery Automobile. Ratan Tata, the Chairman Emeritus of Tata Sons met with the executives of Israel Corporation during the launch of Qoros 3 sedan at the Geneva motor show earlier this month. It should be noted that Tata Motors already has a JV arrangement with Chery and they are preparing to start a factory at Changsha. While the tie-up would provide Tata Motors a foot in the door of the low-cost car segment in Europe, it is envisaged that the shared technology would also help in making better product offerings to customers based in India. Tata Motor's shares were trading down by 1.8%.
