African Thoughts: September 15, 2014

Good morning, interest slowly returning to the African space with 2 particularly large off market crosses in Nigeria going through.

Nigeria:

As above, 2 particularly large crosses went through off-market in Lagos last week. First up on Monday was the turn of Dangote Cement with 243m shares (ca. 1.25% of the company) crossing off market. The seller was Dangote Industries and the buyer was the Investment Corporation of Dubai. On Tuesday there was a cross of 1.3bn shares in Ashaka Cement, Lafarge Nigeria the seller and Lafarge Africa the buyer as part of Lafarges on-going process to consolidate the SA and Nigerian assets. In normal trading the banks found some bids into the close of the week as they closed up 1.92% mostly on the back of ETI (+8.17%, N19.32). The consumers ended the week marginally soft with losses in the likes of Guinness (-4.98%, N171.99) and UACN (-1.01%, N58). There were also big moves in names like Dangote Sugar (+7.98%, N8.80) and Forte Oil (+7.58%, N235.60).

Kenya:

The NSE 20 ended the week down by just a mere 1bp as activity rose to decent levels while the NSE itself started trading. Foreign participation remains pretty much 50% of overall volumes but please note this includes some suspicious foreign trades in BATK which get reallocated post trading. In normal trading the most active stock was once again Safcom as the telco shed 2.3% to KES12.90 followed by KNCB which ended the week unchanged at KES57.50. The NSE listed during the week and ended the week up 126.3% at KES21.50 on good volumes and was also (unsurprisingly) the biggest gainer for the week.

Zimbabwe:

The Industrials index shed 71bps last week as profit takers took the chance to take money off the table after some heavyweights reached all-time highs. YTD the index is now down 1.12%. The major activity was a large cross in CBZ during Fridays session of 34.4m shares (foreign seller, local buyer). Despite foreign buying in the following names they all ended the week in the red: Delta (-3.63%, 132.99c), Econet (-1.20%, 83c) and Innscor (-3.30%, 73c). Econet touched an all-time high of 85c during the week.

Mauritius:

The Semdex gained 50bps last week while the Sem-7 closed marginally in the red as volumes were solid over the entire week. MCBG witnessed several chunky crosses as the banking group ended the week up 40bps at Rs208.50 while SBM closed down 90bps at Rs1.05. In the hotels we saw NMH close unchanged at Rs88.00 while Lux gained an impressive 11.1% at Rs57.50.