Top 40 not spared

South Africa’s largest companies have not been spared, as the scale of the continuing self-off on the JSE can also be seen in every single Top 40 company by market capitalisation trading sharply down on their morning opening price.

The Top 40 index dropped 9.85% or about 4324 points by 4:30pm from its morning opening to of  43,863.69. 

The measure of how far server the drop is can be seen in mining companies Sibanye Stillwater falling 22.93% to R 23.60 a share, Northam Platinum dropping 21.42% to R88.17 and Impala Platinum down 20.76% to R97.54.

The Top 40 index’s largest companies were also not spared. Prosus slumped 8.47% to R984 British American Tobacco plc fell 8.25% to R558.40. Naspers lost 8.25%, seeing its price fall to R2,276.24.

Absa and Nedbank showed some resilience as they were only down respectively 3.13% to R118.29 and 4.20% to R146.58.

Sasol, which fell out of the Top 40, continued its slide, slipping to as low as R29.60 before recovering to R34.40.

The carnage on the JSE continued today with the Alsi index collapsing by over 4000 points or over 10% to 45044.

Global markets continue to haemorrhage in the wake of the rapidly spreading Coronavirus, which has now been classified as a pandemic by the World Health Organisation.