Colombian banking bonanza
It’s been a busy week in Colombian banking. Bank of Nova Scotia underscored the level of interest in the country’s highly profitable – and highly promising – sector by snapping up a majority stake in Colpatria for $1bn.
Earlier, Colombia’s third biggest bank, Davivienda, launched a secondary share offering for up to $420m to raise cash for acquisitions in central and south America. Continue reading »
Guest post: Libya after Gaddafi
By Thierry Apoteker of TAC Financial
The complete fall of the Libyan regime and the end of Colonel Gaddafi’s 42-year rule is opening a new chapter for the country. Its small population (5.5m people), large oil resources (exports of oil and gas reached $44bn in 2010) and the dire need for substantial reconstruction spending hold great appeal for international companies. But the challenges facing the governing National Transition Council and the risk of new rounds of instability and violence are substantial. How to define the right path forward? Continue reading »
Chart of the week: the 1m-plus cities
This month will see the world’s population reach seven billion – a chance to think about the many implications and to examine which countries have benefited from the so-called demographic dividend.
But beyondbrics is going to look at a slightly different angle: cities. Specifically, cities with over a million inhabitants. Continue reading »
Kiev’s unexpected funding boost
By Yulianna Vilkos of Debtwire
A measure introduced by Ukraine’s central bank in 2009 to reduce local banks’ exposure to the US dollar has unexpectedly handed the government a new means of attracting much-needed funding. Cut off from the Eurobond market by prohibitive spreads and faced with negligible demand for its own local-currency debt, Kiev has started selling domestic, hryvnia-denominated bonds with an in-built currency hedge that compensates the holder if the local currency drops in value against the US dollar.
The plan looks odd but it is working. The same Ukrainian banks that are shunning the government’s standard bond auctions have this month already bought more than $650m worth of these so-called “indexed bonds”. Continue reading »
Mozambique – ready for gas wealth?
Eni SpA, the Italian energy company, has made a “giant” gas discovery off the coast of Mozambique that could change the fortunes of one of the world’s poorest countries… eventually.
Although the find could represent a much needed windfall for the east-African country, questions of infrastructure, politics and how the wealth will trickle down to the average citizen all mean this pay-day is many years off. Continue reading »
Kazakh suitor for Barclays in Russia
Barclays is about to leave Russian retail banking once and for all. As Russian daily Kommersant reports on Friday, the group appears to have finally found a buyer for its short-lived retail banking business: Kazakh-born banking tycoon Igor Kim.
According to Kommersant, Kim is poised to beat out rivals suitors, including Renaissance Capital and Kazakhstan’s Kazommertsbank, for Barclays’ Russian assets, which were valued at Rb24.1bn by Interfax rankings in July. But will Kim be the final buyer? Continue reading »
Will Thai floods impact investment?
As central Bangkok residents brace for possible floods and many factories north of the Thai capital remain under two metres of water, investors are starting to ask whether the worst floods in 50 years will damage the country’s prospects as a major global manufacturing base.
Japanese car makers like Toyota and Honda and electronics manufacturers from Sony to Western Digital, the world’s leading maker of hard disk drives, have warned that production will suffer because of the floods, which have inundated an area the size of Switzerland and killed more than 340 people. Continue reading »
Fund flows: coming back slowly
Money began drifting back into EM funds in the week to Wednesday, according to the latest data from EPFR, the fund flow monitor. As analysts at RBS put it: “After a series of brutal outflows during the past month, EM fixed income and EM equity funds registered inflows, albeit modest in nature.”
Brutal is the word. Over the previous three weeks, outflows from EM bond funds totalled $4.73bn. It would be pushing it to say this week’s inflows of $106m marked a turning of the tide. Continue reading »
Weibo breaks the language barrier
Courtesy of Ogilvy & Mather
Only in places as international as Hong Kong would trilingual ads with wordplay in two alphabets be anything but a linguist’s pipe dream.
Yet new ad campaigns in Hong Kong and Tunisia mix multiple languages in reaching out to their local markets, showing the difficulty of crafting advertisements for some Asian and African markets. Of course most ads have to be written in the local language — but what about when it’s hard to figure out what the local language really is? Continue reading »
Doing Business in Brazil: heading for bottom of Brics class
“Brazil is not for beginners”. That was a line from Tom Jobim, the late Brazilian composer behind the bossa nova hit “The Girl from Ipanema”. And it seems the World Bank could not agree more.
In the bank’s latest Doing Business report, Brazil has fallen six places and is now ranked 126th out of 183 countries. In other words, it’s considered the 58th most difficult place to do business in the world. That’s more difficult than Azerbaijan, Greece, Guyana and Argentina, to name but a few. Continue reading »
New York headlines
* Libyans in streets to mark end of Gaddafi
* Scotiabank extends Latin American ties
* Anglo’s $900m tax bill on Chilean sale
* TNK-BP deputy chief to step down Continue reading »
China: Occupy Wall St gets too close
When Occupy Wall Street was no more than an obscure little protest in New York, the Chinese state media were really intrigued by the movement. China Daily, the country’s largest English-language daily newspaper, blasted the Western media for allegedly hushing up the news. Over the past month, Communist party mouthpieces and nationalist tabloids have relished the chance to bash the West and lecture America.
But now that the protests have spread around the world and appear to be morphing into a movements against many things including ruthless capitalism, corruption, inequality and the arrogance of power, China’s rulers have apparently decided that this is getting too close to home. Continue reading »
Taiwan: technology is no saviour
For all its technical and electronic wizardry, there have always been natural seasons to the sale of consumer electronics: a sluggish start, especially in February, with the end of the summer through to Thanksgiving and Christmas the busy period.
But this year, the seasonal rhythm is disrupted. Economic woes in the US and Europe are contributing to a continued slow-down in exports and even the tech industry is not immune. This is reflected in Taiwan’s export data, given the island’s tech-focused, export-oriented economy. Continue reading »
Rupee heads lower and lower
The rupee hit a 30-month low against the US dollar at Rs50.18 Friday morning, just four days before the Reserve Bank of India is likely to raise interest rates for the 13th time since March 2010 as it fights to contain persistently high inflation.
The rupee should continue heading south in the near-term and could even go as low as Rs52 – near its record low of 52.18 in March 2009 – despite the central bank’s aggressive moves to contain inflation. Continue reading »
Further reading: Gaddafi’s death
Friday’s top picks from the beyondbrics team: Gaddafi’s death and Libya’s future; Lex on EM companies’ borrowing spree; the coming elections following the Arab spring; and the need for e-commerce laws in China. Continue reading »
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