Sensex Posts Worst H1 Fall Since 2020

Media Wing (LetsxOtt)

Journalist

2 July 2026 · 13 days ago

2 min read

While IT Stocks Sank, These Sectors Quietly Doubled Investor Money

Source: LetsXott

The Sensex just wrapped up its worst first half of the year since the pandemic year of 2020, and Indian IT stocks are the reason everyone's talking about it.The benchmark fell 10.3 percent between January and June, while the Nifty dropped 8.7 percent, its weakest first half stretch since 2022.But the real damage sat inside one sector. The Nifty IT index tanked 31 percent this year, its steepest six month fall since 2003, when the index dropped 32 percent.

Investors are worried, and it's not hard to see why.Infosys lost 38.07 percent of its value in six months. TCS fell 37 percent.Wipro dropped 35 percent, and all three names dragged the wider index down with them. Analysts keep pointing to the same fear, that AI is starting to eat into the demand for the kind of outsourced tech work these companies built their business on. That's not a small worry for an industry that's carried Indian markets for two decades. And it wasn't just a bad quarter, it looked like the start of something the sector hasn't figured out how to answer yet.

Not everything turned red though. Defence stocks jumped 22.9 percent in the same six months, and energy and metal shares also posted gains while IT bled. Smaller companies did even better, with 552 stocks among the 1,400 names in the BSE MidCap and SmallCap indices rising more than 6.5 percent, and 114 of those more than doubled their worth. Honestly, watching money run from IT straight into defence and small caps feels like the market picking sides in a fight nobody's officially declared yet. Traders are now watching the India US trade deal talks and the monsoon for the next signal on where things go from here.