On Friday, Indian stock markets saw a decline from their record highs due to broad-based profit booking and a global cyber outage that disrupted various sectors. The NSE Nifty 50 index fell by 1.09% to 24,530.9, while the S&P BSE Sensex dropped by 0.91% to 80,604.65. Earlier in the day, both indices had reached record highs, marking a brief period of positive performance before the end-of-day slump.
The decline on Friday reduced the benchmarks’ weekly gains to a modest 0.1%, ending a seven-week winning streak, the longest since January 2018. The brief rally earlier in the session had contributed to the overall positive trend in the indices, but the profit-taking and external disruptions led to the late-day losses.
Indian Stock Markets Decline from Record Highs Amid Profit-Taking and Global Cyber Outage
The global cyber outage significantly affected operations across multiple industries, including airlines, broadcasters, and financial services. In India, airlines like Interglobe Aviation and brokerages such as Nuvama Wealth Management and Motilal Oswal Financial Services experienced operational challenges, with some firms seeing losses between 1% and 4%.
Market sentiment was also impacted by nervousness surrounding the upcoming national budget scheduled for July 23. Analysts anticipate that the budget will aim to boost consumption while maintaining fiscal prudence, contributing to the current market apprehension.
In individual stock performances, Reliance Industries, a major component of the Nifty 50, saw a 2% decline ahead of its quarterly results announcement. Conversely, Infosys saw a 2% increase after revising its revenue growth outlook for fiscal year 2025. However, Persistent Systems faced a 6.4% drop following lower-than-expected operating profit margins. Overall, all major sectors recorded losses on Friday, with small-cap and mid-cap indices both falling by about 2%.
