NZ stocks: Carter Holt stars on otherwise featureless market

12.00 pm

Carter Holt Harvey continued to star on an otherwise largely featureless sharemarket today.

The forest products company which produced a mediocre, but better than expected, fourth quarter result gained 5.7 per cent yesterday and continued to rise after the market closed, hitting a 10 month high of 192.

It came off those highs today but was still up 5c on yesterday's close at 188, topping the turnover by volume with 3.1 million shares.

Forsysth Barr Frater Williams executive director Don Turkington said that while Carter Holt's return on sales remained poor, the December quarter profit of $25 million was better than expected and all divisions had traded profitably. He said a number of analysts were considering upgrading their profit forecasts for the group.

Dr Turkington said Carter Holt was running into sizeable selling now.

Carter Holt's rise helped offset Telecom's 6c fall to 532, leaving the indicator NZSE-40 capital index off 5.48 points at 2108.19 just after 11am.

Turnover of $32.9 million was boosted by $20 million worth of offmarket trades in leading Australian stocks including Lion Nathan, Coles Myer, ANZ, AMP, Telstra, Westpac and Amcor.

The Reserve Bank left interest rates unchanged as was widely expected and gave little indication whether the bank would push rates up at the next review on March 20.

DB Group continues its very strong run, rising 5c to 650 despite the poor summer eating into sales and profits.

Others to move included: Baycorp, down 5c to 715, Fletcher Building, up 1c to 292, Goodman Fielder, up 3c to 181, Ports of Auckland, up 5c to 555, Software of Excellence, down 6c to 310, and The Warehouse, down 5c to 670.

Fisher and Paykel Healthcare fell 40c to 1635 while its sister company, F&P Appliances, slipped 5c to 1065.

The 29 rises were outweighed by 31 falls among the 115 stocks traded.

- NZPA