Asian equity markets are lower today amid greater political uncertainty and as the euro climbed near to two-year highs on Thursday post the comments from the chief of the European Central Bank. The Shanghai Composite is off 0.21%, while the Hang Seng is down 0.26%. The Nikkei 225 is trading down by 0.25%. The US stocks ended mixed on Thursday.

Back home, share markets in India have opened the day on a flat note with a positive bias. The BSE Sensex is trading higher by 48 points, while the NSE Nifty is trading higher by 12 points. The BSE Mid Cap Index opened up by 0.1% while BSE Small Cap index opened the day up by 0.2%.

Sectoral indices have opened the day on a mixed note with information technology stocks and realty stocks leading the gainers. While healthcare stocks and bank stocks have opened in the red. The rupee is trading at 64.43 to the US$.

IT stocks opened the day on a mixed note with Wipro and Mphasis leading the gains. Wipro on Thursday posted a 1.2% rise in its consolidated net profit at Rs 20.77 billion for the April-June quarter.

Besides, the company's board has announced a share buyback proposal of Rs 110 billion entailing 343 million equity shares at Rs 320 apiece.

Buybacks Over the Years

Tanushree Banerjee, Co-head of Research has written everything you need to know about the share buybacks in the IT sector and has offered insights on how the firms deal with the huge cash piles (Subscription Required). Here's a snippet of what she wrote:

• "So, what should long-term investors do? There's no doubt that tendering a part of your shares in a buyback could be a tempting proposition, especially if the buyback price is higher than the market price.
  
  However, it's important to understand that buybacks reduce the outstanding number of shares. Thus, the shareholders who don't tender their shares will end up with a bigger piece of the pie."

This comes at a time when the technology outsourcing industry is grappling with slowing growth and rising demand from investors for higher returns.

The company had registered a net profit of Rs 20.52 billion in the year-ago period. Its total income grew marginally to Rs 142.81 billion during the first quarter.

The company also gave out a guidance for the IT services' business in the range of -0.5% to 1.5% or US $1,962 million to US$2,001 million.

As per The Economic Times, while this quarter was better than expected on all fronts due mainly to better-than-expected volume growth, the company may see growth come by only in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2018.

Wipro share price surged 6.2% in the opening session.

Meanwhile, The European Central Bank (ECB) left its ultra-easy monetary policy unchanged, suggesting that it may delay the decision on tapering bond buys until autumn when the matter will be discussed again.

The ECB is not in a hurry to taper down its stimulus as inflation is still not back to its target.

After ECB chief Mario Draghi raised the prospect of policy tightening last month, he signalled that any policy tweaks would come only gradually, setting the scene for a possible discussion in September about a long-awaited tapering of its asset buys.

Gold prices ended higher Thursday, marking their longest streak of session gains in two months as the euro jumped in the wake of a European Central Bank meeting, putting pressure on the US dollar.