Saturday, April 18, 2009

NSE weekly catch up- out of step

NSE has in the main been tracking western markets this year. With the odd variation here and there. And this week's 61pt is one of them. I suspect a portion of this is driven by the 25% post-spilt Equity drop. My own estimate was that the inflexion point for Equity spilt shares would be Ksh10, but Friday buy and sell volumes were not that different. So it appears that for now, principals are not reducing stakes.

Results:
ScanGroup-now with a stake owned by WPP one of the world's largest ad firms announced 29% PAT uptick on 2007 driven (translating to 20% in EPS), by 21% growth in turnover. DPS is 0.75, a little lower than prior yr. ScanGroup has a huge market share in Kenya (53%) and a third in TZ and Ug. And these markets are growing. Forecast for 2009 is 10% yoy growth. Btw, I predict ScanGroup will be fully/majority owned by WPP within next few years.
EA Cables was first off the block with quartely numbers. PAT was down 19% on turnover falling by 3%. One of the reasons given for this is a bit ambigous to say the least. Apparently LME prices fell. LME is ofcourse London Metal Exchange. So why would falling copper and aluminium prices be a bad rather than a good thing for a company that uses these are raw materials? I don't recall mention of any hedging in the annual results.

Macroeconomy: World Bank projects 2-3% growth for 2009 while Africa Development Bank projects 5.5%.

Other markets: A nice study in contrasts with USE by Bankelele.

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