Led by local institutions, PSX soars to record
Foreign funds would divert their liquidity into buying Pakistan's stocks. This would merely increases prices of shares and be profitable for those who already hold stocks. PHOTO: FILE
Listen to article
Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) on Wednesday soared to an all-time high at nearly 118,000 as it extended the winning streak, gaining over 950 points on the back of robust local institutional buying and potential resolution of the longstanding circular debt problem.
Heightening prospects of approval of the first International Monetary Fund (IMF) review under the $7 billion Extended Fund Facility boosted investor confidence. It will lead to the release of the second IMF loan tranche of over $1 billion.
Additionally, reports of clearing the outstanding dues of independent power producers (IPPs) eased concerns of the energy sector. Key sectors that saw strong buying were cement, commercial banks, oil and gas, fertiliser and power. They helped propel the index to the intra-day high of 118,244.
Arif Habib Corp MD Ahsan Mehanti wrote that stocks closed bullish amid speculation about the settlement of Rs1.5 trillion worth of circular debt in the power sector, following reports of IMF's conditional readiness to approve the government's circular debt management plan, under which Rs1.25 trillion would be raised through commercial banks.
Higher global crude oil prices and expectations of a reduction in the industrial power tariff played the role of catalysts in bullish close at the PSX, he added.
At the end of trading, the benchmark KSE-100 index posted an impressive rise of 972.94 points, or 0.83%, and settled at 117,974.03.
Topline Securities reported that the KSE-100 index hit the record high at 117,974, higher by 973 points. The market continued its upward momentum, fuelled by strong buying by local institutions, and peaked at 118,244 during the day.
The rally was primarily driven by Hub Power, Mari Petroleum, Engro Holdings, Systems Limited and Pakistan Petroleum, which together contributed 551 points to the index. On the other hand, Fauji Fertiliser Co, Engro Fertilisers and Pakistan Oilfields pulled the index down by 54 points.
Arif Habib Limited (AHL) stated that while continuing its rally towards January highs, the KSE-100 index reached close to 118,000.
A total of 57 shares rose, while 38 declined. Hubco (+4.8%), Mari Petroleum (+1.83%) and Systems Limited (+2.39%) were the top contributors to the index gains, it said. On the downside, Fauji Fertiliser Company (-0.21%), Engro Fertilisers (-0.39%) and Pakistan Oilfields (-0.59%) were the biggest drags. AHL pointed out that Wednesday's close above 117,900 was the highest on record, with the next target being the intra-day high of 118,700. It expected the upward momentum to gain pace as the market entered a vacuum.
JS Global analyst Muhammad Hasan Ather said that bulls continued to dominate the trading floor as the benchmark index managed to close higher for the fifth straight session at an all-time high of 117,974 (+973 points), mainly led by oil & gas, power and fertiliser sectors.
The continuation of bullish activities was primarily attributed to the likely resolution of the circular debt issue and approval of the IMF review, he said. Ather advised investors to adopt a "buy-on-dips" strategy and remained positive about the market.
KTrade Securities, in its market wrap, observed that the upward trajectory was driven by a better trading activity, progress on the IMF review and the reported release of IPPs' dues, coupled with hopes of a solution to the circular debt issue.
Power, oil and gas, cement and banking sectors led the increase in the KSE-100 index, where Hubco, Mari Petroleum, Engro Holdings, Systems Limited, Pakistan Petroleum and Lucky Cement were the top contributors, it said. Overall trading volumes increased to 544.2 million shares compared with Tuesday's tally of 449.5 million.
During the day, shares of 449 companies were traded. Of these, 221 stocks closed higher, 157 fell and 71 remained unchanged. The value of shares traded stood at Rs32.3 billion.
Pakistan International Bulk Terminal was the volume leader with trading in 52.2 million shares, gaining Rs0.39 to close at Rs11.05. It was followed by Pak Elektron with 36.1 million shares, rising Rs3.19 to close at Rs48.14 and WorldCall Telecom with 30.9 million shares, gaining Rs0.07 to close at Rs1.40. Foreign investors sold shares worth Rs963.9 million.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Business Recorder
4 hours ago
- Business Recorder
K-Electric's EPIC 2025 event brings a different kind of ‘energy' to Habib University
The grand finale of K-Electric's (KE) Energy Progress and Innovation Challenge (EPIC) 2025 was held at Habib University on Wednesday. A team from National University of Science and Technology (NUST) that presented a project on tamper-proof PMT-based loadshedding and transformer control was declared the winner, walking away with prize money of Rs1.5 million. EPIC 2025 provided a platform for entrepreneurs, startups, researchers, and academia to develop localised, home-grown solutions that addressed ten 'challenge statements', including 'Real-time fleet tracking and visibility for power utilities', 'Smart monitoring of transmission lines: enhancing grid reliability' and 'Open innovation: driving transformation in the power sector'. Launched in March 2025, the initiative attracted over 250 applications from all over the country. After an internal jury assessment comprising functional heads, 10 projects were shortlisted to compete at the grand finale, featuring solutions ranging from AI-driven demand forecasting to IoT-based fleet management and smart theft detection to an esteemed external panel of jury members, according to a press release issued by the company. The winning NUST team claimed their plug-and-play solution allows them to switch off a PMT remotely, which could greatly reduce the impact of loadshedding to a lower number of customers. The second winner's project, presented by a group from Govt College University Faisalabad, was on demand forecasting automation using an artificial neural network, crucial for grid stability and plant efficiency perspectives. The third winner, from NED University, presented a project called optimized AI model for accurate electricity demand forecast. The runner-up was awarded Rs1 million while the second runner-up was awarded Rs750,000. But it was the solutions and spirit with which they were presented that was invaluable. Other presentations dealt with a variety of themes: curbing electricity theft, improving recovery rates, battery energy storage utilization, pre-emptive transformer level failure detection, and photovoltaic impact analysis. Imagine if a transformer breakdown is detected beforehand. Now imagine loadshedding based on PMTs – technologically not possible at the moment. These are practical questions Pakistan's power sector is asking and their answers were the core discussion points at EPIC 2025. Moonis Alvi, CEO at KE, said he was excited about the potential prospect of utilising the solutions. 'Law-breakers are sometimes smarter than lawmakers. It is my hope that these ideas can help Pakistan's power sector and are scalable. I am looking forward to engaging with the finalists. But this is a continuous process. The engagement needs to continue.' During her address to the audience, Sadia Dada, Chief Distributions and Marcomms Officer, made it clear that any solution would not go through a process of limiting it to KE. 'These solutions will be for the entire power sector in the country.' Speaking to Business Recorder on the sidelines of the event, Dada said the challenges facing Pakistan's power sector, especially on the distribution side, are very unique to our geography. 'It is difficult to find solutions off the shelf. So we want those that are localised and homegrown. This ties in with our localisation agenda. 'Because the people developing these solutions understand the context, most of the finalists are from Karachi. Some of them are from Faisalabad, Islamabad, and Lahore. Having this intellectual capital in the country and not utilise is also a wasted opportunity. I am excited at taking these solutions and implementing them in the KE business model. Talking about loadshedding, Dada said KE cannot provide free electricity to customers who do not pay. 'But there are pockets where there are paying customers. If we can bring down the circumference of the impact of loadshed to a PMT level, that would be a win-win, and one of our finalists has worked on this solution.'
Express Tribune
4 hours ago
- Express Tribune
Twilight of the Empire
US President Donald Trump gestures, as he departs for Pennsylvania, on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, DC, U.S., May 30, 2025. Photo: Reuters Listen to article As a series of trends and shocks cumulatively strain the old order, US President Donald Trump, even his critics must admit, possesses the fatal gift of locating the aching pulse of the nation, only to inflame it further with self-destructive measures while eroding Washington's global credibility. He sees the symptoms of American decline clearly: deindustrialisation, a brittle middle class, bloated trade deficits, and the political cost of endless wars. But he metabolises crisis into spectacle, grievance into doctrine, and interdependence into betrayal. For decades, the US has functioned as the imperial core of a global capital-recycling apparatus. The system has depended on the continuous inflow of surplus capital from export-heavy economies, including China and Germany, to America's debt-saturated financial architecture. The US trade deficit reached an eye-watering $1.1 trillion in 2023, a figure that dwarfs those of other peripheral or semi-peripheral economies like India. In this light, Trump's populist howl against the 'indignity' of the American people, dispossessed in the very belly of global wealth, is not entirely misplaced. His instinct that endless wars serve as spectacles to obscure the real mechanism of American hegemony – the global dollar-debt regime – is accurate in a crude, pre-theoretical sense. Since the late 1960s, when America ceased being a surplus nation, its geopolitical muscle has rested not on production but on its control of the dollar as the global reserve currency. The military-industrial complex is merely the theatrical wing of a deeper financial imperialism. However, Trump is radically mistaken in his belief that punitive tariffs and protectionist swagger will resurrect 'Middle America.' Tariffs, in the late neoliberal stage, cannot revive industrial capacity gutted by decades of offshoring and rentier capitalism. Instead, they risk destabilising the very mechanism whereby America's status as a debtor empire is transformed into an asset: the recycling of dollar-denominated debt into US capital markets. If that circuit is broken, the paper wealth of Wall Street and the speculative empires of Trump's own class will collapse. To materially uplift the working and lower-middle classes that fuelled his electoral resurgence, Trump would have to declare war not on China or Brussels, but on Manhattan and Malibu, hedge funds, private equity, and speculative real estate. 'Asymmetric interdependence' For much of the post-World War II period, what was marketed as 'globalisation' was, in fact, an imperial project cloaked in liberal universals. It was the projection of American state-capitalist hegemony through a scaffold of multilateral institutions – the IMF, World Bank, WTO, NATO – and the sacrosanct status of the dollar as the planetary currency-signifier. These were not neutral frameworks but instruments of asymmetric interdependence: the United States exported capital, debt, and ideology, while importing dependence, discipline, and surplus labour from the periphery and semi-periphery. The so-called "Washington Consensus" was never a consensus but a diktat. The system also functioned through a deeper ideological fantasy that free markets and global rule-based order were apolitical, universal, and benign. However, even most liberal-internationalist critiques warn the fantasy is fraying. The very interdependence that sustained US primacy is in retreat. Firms and governments worldwide need American consumers, capital markets, and alliances, giving Washington soft coercive power. Trump's tactics have upended that balance. By 'assailing interdependence,' the administration is chipping away at the very basis of American advantage. Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye argue that order depends on stable power balances, shared norms, and sustaining institutions. Trump has shaken all three. What follows is a deeper drift into disorder, one that won't resolve until Washington either reorients itself or is overtaken by a new dispensation. The plunge may already be underway. 'In his erratic and misguided effort to make the United States even more powerful, Trump may bring its period of dominance—what the American publisher Henry Luce first called 'the American century'—to an unceremonious end,' they write in a Foreign Affairs essay. The weaponisation of the global economy hollows out the very symbolic order the US once used to legitimate its rule. By shrinking its adversaries' strategic space, Washington also corrodes the interconnected lattice that once lent credibility and allure to its empire. A tariff here, a blacklist there, and the freezing of foreign bank reserves – each may win tactical advantage, but at the cost of eroding the trust that underpinned the liberal international order. After all, what merchant or government would dare anchor long-term plans to a system where every node can be severed by a presidential signature? Trump's disruption is risky for the US precisely because new economic blocs are emerging from the wreckage of Western hegemony. Many leaders of the Global South remember colonialism and feel the 21st century liberates them from Western diktats. Where the US once posed as the sole path to progress, China's tech power and Russia's security reach now appear less like threats and more like counterweights. On soft power's front, when natural disasters strike or epidemics spread, Western-style NGOs and media have lost some of their framing power, as Chinese and Russian aid convoys now appear on television alongside those from the Red Cross. The velvet-glove diplomacy of the Cold War years – teddy bears over bombers – has been largely replaced by quarantine diplomacy, vaccine pledges, and once-dominant American development agencies playing second fiddle to Belt-and-Road contracts. In May, a major Democracy Perception Index reported that majorities of people worldwide now see the US negatively. The pollster noted that after Trump's return to the White House, America's reputation 'took a particularly massive hit in EU countries' and fell sharply everywhere. Even NATO founder Anders Fogh Rasmussen sighed that the US' standing was 'unloved' across most of the world. By contrast, China's image is improving globally, even overtaking the US in overall favourability in most regions. At home, the US is cannibalising its future. Budget cuts to core research agencies like the NSF and NIH are hollowing out the very ecosystem that once drove American innovation. Labs shrink, fellowships vanish, and global talent turns to Beijing, Singapore, or the UAE – where funding flows and visas follow. Meanwhile, China invests aggressively in semiconductors, AI, and green tech, eroding the US edge. As Oxford's Carl Benedikt Frey puts it, Trump's agenda risks dismantling the pillars of US innovation. Technological leadership is not a birthright but is built. And Washington is letting it rot. Trump's move to turn tariff-penalties and export bans into blunt instruments has worried many that he was abandoning existing rules and undermining the soft power that Washington has spent decades building. Analysts argue that American power rests on a blend of hard force and attraction, even though this very soft power has enabled hard power interventions. Interdependence with trading partners and multilateral institutions generates US leverage, while global admiration for 'American culture and ideals' makes allies pliant, they argue. Trump's assault on trade pacts and international agencies undercuts the foundation of American power and accelerates the erosion of the postwar order. In principle, if American power were absolute, it could force partners into line indefinitely. In practice, aggressive trade measures are sowing resentments. Many countries have been party to US-led trade deals expecting mutual benefit – now they wonder if Washington will simply upend their exports to punish political stances. The WTO and other legal venues, for a long time arenas where small states could begrudge larger ones, are being largely sidelined. Without clear enforcement, the most vulnerable economies will look for alternative blocs or simply bribe each other to stay out of the US orbit. The cruellest irony is that by inflicting pain on others – or threatening to – the US is undermining the very goodwill and partnerships that underpinned its postwar hegemony. The writer is a Lahore-based senior journalist
Business Recorder
10 hours ago
- Business Recorder
Pakistan's plan to sharply increase growth faces headwinds, analysts say
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan is aiming to sharply increase economic growth under its annual federal budget unveiled on Tuesday, but analysts are sceptical about the country's ability to meet its ambitious goals. The budget targets higher revenues and a steep fiscal deficit cut under International Monetary Fund (IMF) backed reforms. Yet, defence spending was hiked 20%, excluding military pensions, after last month's conflict with India. Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb said in a post-budget press conference on Wednesday that customs duties have been cut or removed on thousands of raw materials and intermediate goods. 'Industry here has to be competitive, competitive enough to export,' he said. But growth drivers remain unclear. The government is targeting 4.2% GDP growth in fiscal 2026, up from 2.7% this year, which was revised down from an initial 3.6% as agriculture and large-scale manufacturing underperformed. 'Pakistan's GDP growth projection of 4.2% appears ambitious given recent performance, and overly optimistic assumptions may place tax targets out of reach,' said Callee Davis, senior economist at Oxford Economics. Key highlights of Pakistan budget for 2025-26 Pakistan's past growth spurts were consumption-led, triggering balance-of-payments crises and IMF bailouts. The government says it now wants higher-quality, investment-driven growth. Aurangzeb said structural reforms are underway, pointing to East Asia-style pro-market transitions. 'This is an East Asia moment for Pakistan,' he said. The 17.57 trillion rupee ($62.24 billion) budget comes as Pakistan remains under a $7 billion IMF programme. Revenues are projected to rise over 14%, driven by new taxes and broadening the tax base. The fiscal deficit is targeted at 3.9% of GDP, down from this year's 5.9%. Income tax calculator for FY 2025-26 Key reforms include taxing agriculture, real estate, and retail, and reviving stalled privatisations. But revenue shortfalls this year have raised doubts, with both agriculture income tax and retail collections missing targets. Only 1.3% of the population paid income tax in 2024, government data shows. 'Pakistan's budget keeps the IMF and investors happy, even if it comes at a near-term cost to growth,' said Hasnain Malik, head of equity strategy at Tellimer. 'The political setup, with the military firmly in charge, also lowers the risk of protests.' While overall spending will fall 7%, defence will rise after the worst fighting between the nuclear-armed neighbours in decades. Including pensions, defence spending will total $12 billion, 19% of the federal budget or 2.5% of GDP, matching India's share, per World Bank data. The hike was enabled by a sharp drop in interest payments, as the central bank cut policy rates from 22% to 11% over the past year, easing domestic debt servicing costs. Aurangzeb said cuts in subsidies also helped create fiscal space.
