BENGALURU: Indian shares came off record highs to end lower on Friday, on broad-based profit booking ahead of the national budget next week and as a global cyber outage impacted operations of firms across sectors.
The NSE Nifty 50 fell 1.09% to 24,530.9, while the S&P BSE Sensex settled 0.91% lower at 80,604.65. Both the indexes rose about 0.3% to hit record highs earlier in the session.
The drop on Friday trimmed weekly gains to 0.1% for the benchmarks, which have risen for seven weeks, their longest weekly winning streak since January 2018.
A global tech outage disrupted operations in multiple industries on Friday, with airlines halting flights, some broadcasters off-air and everything from banking to healthcare hit by system problems.
Indian airlines and some brokerages also faced technical and operational disruptions. Airline operator Interglobe Aviation, brokerages Nuvama Wealth Management, Motilal Oswal Financial Services, and Angel One, which were impacted, lost between 1% and 4%.
IT boost lift Indian shares to record closing highs
“There is a good possibility of the outage impacting the (trading) volumes, but otherwise also markets are little nervous just before the big event of national budget on July 23,” said Siddharth Sedani, head and executive vice president of equity product and advisory support at Anand Rathi Financial Services.
Analysts expect the Indian budget to boost consumption, while maintaining fiscal prudence.
On Friday, oil-to-telecom conglomerate Reliance Industries , the second heaviest stock in the Nifty 50 index, dropped 2% ahead of its quarterly results due after market close.
India’s second-largest IT services firm Infosys rose 2% after it raised fiscal year 2025 revenue growth outlook.
Persistent Systems lost 6.4% after the IT firm reported operating profit margins below analysts’ estimates.
All the 13 major sectors logged losses on Friday.
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