Shares in ITC, the country's largest cigarette manufacturer, is trading higher by 1.3% at Rs 324 on BSE on back of heavy volumes.

At 1045 hours, a combined 4.16 million shares have already changed hands on the counter against an average around 9 million shares that were traded daily in past two weeks on BSE and NSE.

Markets extended gains in morning trades with buying visible across all the sectors in today's trade. At 1030hrs, the Sensex was up 297 points at 25,396 and the Nifty advanced 87 points to trade at 7,595.

29 of 30 stocks are in green on the Sensex with TCS being the only exception, marginally down 0.06%

FMCG firms are jumping on to the e-commerce bandwagon to retail their products. While Marico is putting in place plans to retail niche brands through e-commerce, Dabur is broad-basing its offerings through the platform by including personal care products and beverages by the end of this year. At present, Dabur sells only healthcare brands online.

Mumbai: The top-five private companies by market capitalization added 578,804 employees in the year ended 31 March, the fewest in 3 years, as companies focused on improving productivity of its existing employees amid a slowdown in the economy.

Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS), Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL), ITC Ltd, HDFC Bank Ltd and Infosys Ltd, saw their combined headcount rise 5% from the previous year, according to data collated from the annual reports of each of the companies.

Owing to the all-round rally after the election results, most stocks are trading at rich valuations. Surprisingly, however, some prominent stocks haven’t participated in this rally— between May 16 and June 25, ITC, United Breweries, Adani Enterprises, Bank of Baroda (BoB) and Idea Cellular (Idea) were the top losers among BSE 100 stocks. Three of these—ITC, BoB and Idea — are among the top picks of brokerages and, therefore, offer a buying opportunity.

ITC, on Friday, posted an 18.4 per cent increase in its standalone net profit which touched Rs.8,785 crore in 2013-14 against Rs.7,418.4 crore in 2012-13, backed by a 11 per cent rise in its net sales which touched Rs.32,883 crore.

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