Himadri was Tk 4,085 a share at the end of the September 3 trading session on the Dhaka Stock Exchange (DSE). The very next trade on Tuesday pushed the stock up by 10 per cent, at which the circuit breaker kicked in to halt trading.
Only one share was traded in the stock's rise from Tk 4,085 to Tk 4493.5, a blatant example of stock price manipulation.
The DSE data from August 7 to September 5 points to how easily Himadri was subjected to artificial price hikes over and over again without any regulatory intervention.
Every trading session ended with Himadri hitting the circuit breaker. But the volume of trade, meaning the quantity of shares exchanged, had been absurdly low, except for a few sessions. In most cases, it took only one share for a 10 per cent increase of Himadri on the SME board of the Dhaka bourse.
"The trading pattern looks unusual. General investors do not trade one or two shares," said Md Azam Khan, chief executive officer of Anwar Securities.
Minhaz Mannan Emon, ex-director of the Dhaka Stock Exchange, explained how such a manipulation job is done.
He said a group of people might have purchased a majority of Himadri shares. They have traded shares within the group to create a demand for the stock. When general investors will join the rally, the fraudsters will offload their holdings, added Mr Emon.
Those, who drove the price up by buying a few shares, will extract profits through selloff of overvalued shares in hundreds or, maybe, thousands.
And not too many people are playing the game. If one person is behind each trade, it is easy to guess maximum how many people could be trying to get undue benefits.
Himadri has not stopped climbing on the SME board even after the stock market regulator asked the DSE to investigate the unusual price hike of the security five days back.
Thanks to manipulation, Himadri became the second most expensive stock at Tk 4,493.5 on the DSE on Tuesday after Reckitt Benckiser at Tk 4,838, which trade on the bourse's main board.
The SME stock was multiplied by 127 times in just five months to Tuesday.
The Bangladesh Securities and Exchange Commission (BSEC) last week asked the DSE probe committee to submit a report in 10 working days.
Himadri's stock started to rise after its listing on the Chittagong Stock Exchange (CSE) in April this year. At that time, the stock price was Tk 35.30 per share.
The rapid stock price surge took the company's market value to Tk 3.06 billion whereas its paid-up capital was a mere Tk 7.50 million.
At the time when the share price was escalating between January and June, the company's sponsor-directors offloaded their stakes at the direction of the securities regulator to increase the number of free float shares.
The sponsor-directors possessed 98.43 per cent of the outstanding shares until December 2022, which came down to 65.72 per cent at the end of June this year.
The little known company's total number of securities is 0.75 million.
Himadri, which operates six potato cold storages in the northern part of the country, reported a remarkable 68 per cent year-on-year jump in profit to Tk 37.95 million for July-December 2022. It is yet to disclose financial figures for the January-June period of FY23.
If Tuesday's closing price of Himadri, Tk 4493.5, on the SME board and the latest cash dividend [10 per cent] paid by the company to shareholders are taken into consideration to calculate dividend yield, it comes to only 0.002 per cent.
That shows how much an investor can expect as future income from the investment made in Himadri at the price.
Company secretary Jahirul Islam earlier said they had no relation to the price hike of shares of the company in the secondary market.
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