Tata Motors, strong foreign investor buying keep Sensex, Nifty level despite Operation Sindoor flux

Indian markets opened on Wednesday in extreme flux as the backdrop of the country’s armed forces carrying out strikes on nine terror targets in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) earlier in the day. India’s response, codenamed ‘Operation Sindoor’, came a fortnight after the brutal Pahalgam terror attack that claimed the lives of 26 civilians.

What came as a silver lining for the markets was the impressive rally in Tata Motors stock, jumping more than 3 per cent in the Wednesday morning session. Late Tuesday night, the leading automaker announced that shareholders approved a proposal a plan to split Tata Motors into two listed companies—TML Commercial Vehicles Limited and Tata Motors Passenger Vehicles Limited.

This seems to have kept the fallout to the escalation of Pakistan-India tensions to a minimum in the markets. However, experts were of the opinion that investor response had already factored in India’s retaliation to the  Pahalgam terror attack. V.K. Vijayakumar of Geojit Investments said, “The market is unlikely to be impacted by the retaliatory strike by India since that was known and discounted by the market.”

Strong and sustained buying by foreign institutional investors (FII) for the past two weeks added to the market resilience. FFIIs bought ₹3,794.52 crore worth of equities on Tuesday alone, bringing the total FII buying to around ₹44,000 crore in the past 14 trading days.

However, the market will be on the lookout for further escalations at the border.

Tata Motors, with their Tuesday announcement, led the gainers on both the Sensex and Nifty in Wednesday morning trade. In the Sensex, other gainers were the State Bank of India, HDFC Bank, IndusInd Bank, and Bajaj Finance.

However, HCL Tech, Asian Paints, Hindustan Unilever, Sun Pharma, and UltraTech Cement lost big.

Early morning in the Asian market, only the Nikkei 225 of Japan traded in the red. Kospi (South Korea), SSE Composite (Shanghai, China) and Hang Seng (Hong Kong) indices traded in positive territory.

The rupee edged 0.1 per cent lower versus the dollar to 84.545 on Wednesday morning.

Business