For the second day in a row, Egyptian indexes were in the red on Monday as retailers and non-Arabs were taken by a bearish sentiment, traders said. Pulling the country's main index down, Orascom Telecom, the largest Arab mobile operator by subscribers, plunged by 2.04 per cent to LE5.76 per share. The North African country's main index EGX 30 fell by 0.86 per cent, to close at 6,311.92 points. The EGX 70 index, which measures 70 of the country's small and mid caps, shed 1.06 per cent to 552.75 points. Volume hit LE1.6 billion, according to the Egyptian Exchange. Orascom Construction Industries, Egypt's largest builder by market value, slipped by 1.42 per cent, closing at LE226.06 per share. In a related event, a private offering in Egypt's Juhayna Food Industries, part of a plan to raise about LE1 billion ($176.5 million), was 1.75 times oversubscribed, the financial adviser said. The private placement involves 80 per cent of 206 million new shares being offered. The remaining 20 per cent of shares are being offered to the public in Egypt's first initial public offering (IPO) since 2008. Karim Awad, head of investment banking at EFG-Hermes, which advised on the placement, said the private offering was priced at LE4.90 and this meant that effectively the public tranche would be priced at LE4.66. Meanwhile, world stocks fell sharply and the euro hit four-year lows against the dollar as investors reacted to signs the US economic recovery may be slowing and to new debt worries centered on eastern Europe. MSCI's all-country world stock index was down 1.5 percent and its emerging market counterpart was off 2.6 percent. "The jobs data may have changed market sentiment a bit because the numbers for this important indicator showed what people have been suspecting for a while, that the U.S. economic recovery may be slowing a little," said Hiroaki Osakabe, fund manager at Chibagin Asset Management in Japan. "Then you have this combined with signs that the euro zone debt problems may be very deep-rooted. Both of these put together are sparking selling." The pan-European FTSEurofirst 300 was down 1.6 per cent. Earlier, Japan's Nikkei closed down 3.84 per cent. The euro fell broadly, hitting its lowest in more than four years against the dollar. Higher-yielding currencies such as the Australian dollar also fell as equities and commodity prices took a knock.
