Asian markets tumble as Wall Street crashes

The Wall Street crash brought down markets across the globe, with Hong Kong stocks falling almost 2 percent on Friday, on investors' fear that the bad US credit situation could blow into a full scale financial crisis.

China COSCO Holdings Co Ltd, however bucked the falling trend to post a life-time high driven by news about the shipping conglomerate's possible acquisition of its parent company's bulk carrier fleet. There is speculation that it might do so by issuing domestic A shares.

The company ended the trading day up 5.4% at HK$13.4.

This also led to the Hong Kong index paring gains, but analysts are of the view that weak European markets could hurt it in the coming days.

Japan's Nikkei average also dropped 2.16 percent to touch its lowest point in almost three months, as the Wall Street crash and a stronger yen dampened sentiments.

The Hang Seng and the Shanghai Composite index have slumped too, with the former shedding 450 points to 22,761, while the latter has dropped 43 points to 4304. The Taiwan Weighted index has crashed 404 points to 9162.

The Straits Times index has dropped 112 points to 3468, and the Seoul Composite index has shed 80 points to 1883.

Global Blues: Sensex drops 546 points to 15,230

The Sensex, which opened with a huge negative gap of 288 points at 15,488, dropped to a low of 15,160 in noon deals on weak global cues -- down 616 points from the previous close.

The index finally closed with a huge loss of 542 points (3.43%) at 15,234. The NSE Nifty ended at 4,442, down 178 points.

All the sectoral indices dropped sharply on Friday. The BSE Realty Index plunged over 5% to 7824. The BSE PSU Index dropped over 4% to 6983.

The broad market breadth was extremely bearish -- out of 2,575 scrips traded, 1,954 declined on Friday.

All Fall Down

Tata Steel plunged over 7% (Rs 52) to Rs 652. Reliance Communications slipped nearly 6% to Rs 537. BHEL declined over 5% to Rs 1,660.

Hindustan Unilever dropped over 4% to Rs 196, and Reliance was down nearly 4% at Rs 1,866.

ONGC, SBI, Tata Motors, Wipro and Bajaj also declined sharply on Friday.

ITC, however, moved up over 3% to Rs 172. Ranbaxy and Ambuja Cements finished with marginal gains.

Most Active Counters

Reliance was the most active counter with a turnover of Rs 414 crore (Rs 4.14 billion)?followed by HDFC (Rs 296 crore or Rs 2.96 billion), Reliance Energy (Rs 239 crore or Rs 2.39 billion), DLF (Rs 235 crore or Rs 2.35 billion) and L&T (Rs 172 crore or Rs 1.72 billion).