African Thoughts: May 30, 2016


Nigeria:

The big news out last week from Lagos was the CBN's announcement that they would start to adopt "a more flexible fx policy". This helped spur activity as speculators got involved with turnover increasing +12.49% to $73.94m. Banking stocks were the main drivers behind activity with crosses in the likes of GTB, Zenith, etc over the course of the week. Another positive was the rally in the market as the ASI managed to close +6.53% higher with consumers closing +8.58% higher thanks to good performances in Guinness (+15.47%), NB (+12.70%) and Nestle (+7.12%). Banking stocks were also very strong with the sector gaining +8.17% thanks to ETI (+19.38%), Stanbic (+17.99%), Zenith (+3.95%) and GTB (+2.03%). The CBN also announced that they would keep the key interest rate and CRR at 12% and 22.50% respectively. The market will be closed today due to a public holiday, but let's hope that the interest in the market will continue when trading resumes on Tuesday.

Kenya:

The market closed lower for the fifth week in a row with the NSE 20 index falling -0.60%, taking the YTD loss to -4.3%. This is very interesting to note as foreigners were net buyers to the tune of $6.02m (the highest in 2016). It was another rather sluggish week from an activity point of view as turnover increased +32.2% to 27.2m with foreigners dominating proceedings and accounting for 69.5% of activity. EABL and EQBNK were the most active names and accounted for 48.5% of activity with foreigners turning net buyers in EQBNK to the tune of $5.2m. KNCB released disappointing Q1 2016 results and saw the highest net foreign outflows ($1.1m). Safcom was very quiet last week with the telco closing -1.4% lower. The MPC met on the 23 May and decided to drop the benchmark rate by 100bps to 10.5% on a lower inflation outlook.

Zimbabwe:

After the recent strength the ZSE has now seen 2 consecutive weeks of losses. The Industrials fell by 1.29% thereby extending the YTD loss to 9.07%. The main drag on the index was Innscor which fell by a massive 14.64% to 20.06% albeit on thin volumes. Delta has also started retreating after its recent run as the beverages giant fell to 71c (-2.07%) on the back of foreign selling with only local demand coming in the name. Econet tried its best to buck the trend and inched higher by 73bps to 22.16c although the name hardly traded.

Mauritius:

It was another sluggish week from an activity point of view with turnover amounting to a very dull $3.6m with most of the activity geared towards Rockcastle and MCBG as the two names accounted for 62.9% of total value traded. The market closed the week lower with the Semdex falling -0.6%, extending the YTD loss to -3.4% as foreigners were net sellers to the tune of $470k. Banking stocks ended the week higher on low volume as SBMH gained +6.0% while MCBG closed +0.2% higher. Hoteliers ended the week mixed with NMH gaining +0.5% while LUX and SUN fell -0.4% and -3.5% respectively.

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