Tadawul dips 1.4% on profit worries

Saudi Arabia's stock index made its largest drop in two weeks yesterday on concern that biggest listed companies may miss estimates in Q2 results. The Tadawul All-Share Index (TASI) dropped 1.43 percent, or 98.13 points, to close at 6,756.99 following a widespread sell-off. Commenting on the Q2 corporate concern, Jarmo T. Kotilaine, chief economist at the National Commercial Bank, said: "Such factors are clearly a consideration, especially for export-oriented companies such as SABIC (Saudi Basic Industries Corp.) that would be vulnerable to a renewed slowdown in the global economy.” He said: “I suspect we will see once again somewhat greater interest in firms with a primarily domestic focus, given the fact that growth drivers within the Kingdom remain generally robust." The analyst added: "Even though some clouds may be appearing on the earnings front, there have been positive surprises as well. For instance, some of the recent bank earnings have been encouraging and largely reflective of the domestic growth drivers." Reuters quoted Ibrahim Masood, senior investment officer at Mashreq Bank, as saying, that petrochemical earnings will be interesting because a lot of end-product prices weakened and were very volatile in Q2 — that's the main thing to watch out for as far as Saudi Arabia is concerned". The value of Saudi traded shares reached SR 8.39 billion with a volume of 362 million shares. From arabnews