Bloomberg/Mumbai

People walk past a digital screen displaying India’s benchmark share index in Mumbai yesterday. Indian shares dropped, a sixth straight fall that took the market to its lowest close in two months, pulled down by a sell-off in energy giant Reliance Industries and weak global markets

Indian stocks fell for the sixth day yesterday, driving the benchmark index to its longest losing streak in a year, led by Hindalco Industries Ltd and Reliance Communications Ltd after they reported declines in profit.
The Bombay Stock Exchange’s Sensitive Index, or Sensex, fell 491.34, or 3.1% to 15,402.94. The S&P CNX Nifty Index on the National Stock Exchange lost 3.1% to 4,563.90. The BSE 200 Index declined 3.2% to 1,900.52. Markets were closed yesterday for a public holiday.
Hindalco, the biggest aluminum producer, sank 11% after it reported a 52% drop in second-quarter profit on lower metals prices. Reliance Communications, the second-largest mobile phone operator, fell 5.7% after it reported second-quarter earnings that missed analysts’ estimates.
“The market’s expectation from earnings was higher, but the numbers are not that great,” said Vaibhav Sanghavi, a director at Ambit Capital Ltd in Mumbai, who manages funds for wealthy individuals.
Overseas funds sold a net Rs15.9bn ($335.6mn) of Indian stocks on October 29, the Securities and Exchange Board of India said on its website. The funds have bought Rs676.9bn of equities this year to date, compared with record net sales of Rs530bn for the whole of 2008.
Hindalco Industries Ltd, the biggest aluminum producer, plunged 11% to Rs109, its lowest in two months. Net income, excluding that of unit Novelis Inc, fell to Rs3.44bn in the three months ended September 30, from Rsd7.2bn a year earlier, the company said in a statement on October 31. The median estimate of five analysts in a Bloomberg survey was Rs5.12bn.
Reliance Communications fell 5.7% to Rs165.8, its lowest since March 24. It said on October 31 that net income tumbled 52% to Rs7.40bn in the quarter ended September 30, missing the Rs11.5bn median of 27 analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg. Credit Suisse Group AG cut its share-price estimate for the stock by 17% to Rs150.
Reliance Communications and Bharti Airtel Ltd, India’s two biggest mobile-phone operators, are the worst performers on the nation’s benchmark stock index this year. Bharti last week reported profit growth slowed for the ninth quarter, and began offering customers call rates as low as Rs0.01 a second to compete against NTT DoCoMo Inc and Reliance Communications.