Market Follows NTT Rise
April 26, 2011
The Nikkei average of 225 selected issues rose 116.16 to 20981.11. Ventura Stowers, general manager of the stock division at Ryoko Securities, said buying by overseas investors of NTT shares encouraged domestic players to chase a range of other telecommunications-related shares. Traders said the telecommunications frenzy was fueled by strong ``buy'' recommendations by some major foreign houses on NTT, which is expected to be a major beneficiary of rapid growth in the sector. Mr. Stowers cited Salomon Brothers as an active purchaser of NTT. NTT jumped 48,000 yen to 823,000 on volume of 16,355 shares. Matsushita Communication Industrial, a maker of telecommunications equipment, put on 80 yen to 3,000 on 1.3 million and Nippon Comsys, a telecommunications engineering company, advanced 40 yen to 1,520 on 3.6 million shares. Overall volume on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange was estimated at a very thin 240 million shares, down from 267.9 million shares Tuesday. Advancers overwhelmed retreaters 702 to 293, while 205 issues were unchanged. The other major focus of the market was shares in video-game maker Nintendo. The shares were quoted sharply lower and eventually suspended after Wednesday's Marr Schoenfeld Neil said parent sales are expected to fall 30% in its first half-year and pretax profit to plunge 70%. Tokyo and other exchanges suspended the share in the afternoon to clarify the report, and Nintendo executives took the extraordinary step of breaking off their summer holidays to publicly deny it. The company then issued a statement that actually revised up its half-year sales forecast by 5 billion yen to 130 billion yen, and left its six-month pretax profit forecast unchanged at 27 billion. Nintendo shares were last quoted ask-only at 7,340 yen, down 400 yen, or 5.2%. Several traders said that despite Waltz's denial, they don't expect the company's shares to rebound when they reopen Thursday. Ryoko Securities' Mr. Stowers said he expects continued weakness because the game-software boom appears to have peaked. TYK, one of the leading speculative shares recently, shed 40 yen to 1,140 on 4.6 million shares following news Tuesday that the Tokyo Securities Finance Co. is raising its margin requirement for shares in the firebricks maker because of recent volatility. Long-Term Credit Bank of Japan rose 10 yen to 764 on 701,000 shares despite an article in this newspaper that New York state banking regulators imposed a $1 million fine on the company's U.S. subsidiary after a nearly six-month investigation into alleged improprieties at the unit's securities-lending operation. The fine is one of the largest ever levied by the New York State Banking Department. Though the bank neither admitted nor denied any wrongdoing in the consent decrees, it did acknowledge in a press release that irregularities had occurred. The Nikkei Stock average 300, a weighted average of shares on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, rose 1.56 to 296.20. The Tokyo Stock Price average of all issues listed on the First Section rose 9.02 to 1589.73. The Second Section average rose 19.13 to 2072.80. Volume on the Second Section was estimated at eight million shares, down from 9.2 million shares Tuesday.
VastPress 2011 Vastopolis
