CAIRO: Shares of Orascom Telecom plunged nearly 10 percent on Wednesday, dragging Egypt s benchmark index to its sharpest single-day fall in two weeks. Orascom Telecom, the sixth-worst performer on the CASE 30 index this year, shed 9.96 percent to LE 31.01. The CASE 30 index, down 50 percent this year to Tuesday s close, dropped 5.11 percent to 5,021.94 points. Stock markets around the world, including in the Gulf Arab region, fell as evidence mounted the rich-world downturn is spreading through emerging markets. Regional markets are doing terrible and all the large caps are correlated to foreign markets, said Teymour El-Derini, trader at Beltone Financial in Cairo. Mostly investors from the Gulf and retailers are selling. Shares of EFG-Hermes, Egypt s largest investment bank, dropped 8.28 percent to LE 21.50. Ghabbour Auto, Egypt s largest publicly traded car assembler, posted its second-highest quarterly profit on record and carpet-maker Oriental Weavers said its profit also grew. But shares of both companies still fell, with Ghabbour down 12.53 percent to LE 20.11 and Oriental Weavers down 4.34 percent to LE 21.80. I don t think the stock price reflects the current information available to the public, Mena Sadek from Beltone investment bank said of Oriental Weavers. Probably the stock price is reflecting the worst of fears, she added. Oriental Weavers sells around 30 percent of its products in the United States and has said stagnation there would hit its full-year profit growth. The Hermes index fell 4.70 percent to 461.96 points.
