Battle for Cove: PTT raises offer
Shell, over to you.
The bidding war for London-listed energy company Cove took another turn on Wednesday. PTT Exploration & Production, Thailand’s biggest oil explorer, raised its offer to 240p per share, or £1.22bn ($1.92bn), trumping Shell’s previous bid of 220p. Continue reading »
In the current blame-game post-mortem that is the Facebook IPO, one thing is being overlooked: the drag effect on some emerging market tech stocks.
Investors who bought Facebook at $38 a share might be feeling a little sore as shares lost 11 per cent on Monday, settling at just over $34. But those holding shares in China’s Tencent (internet and communciations), South Africa’s Naspers (televion and internet) and Russia’s Mail.Ru (online communications) may be equally cheesed off. Continue reading »
Chart of the week: China, India & gold
There comes a time in the life cycle of most commodities when China takes over in terms of demand. For gold, long the preserve of India, that moment is nearly upon us. Continue reading »
Brics: getting unfriendly to business?
Wonga returns to its African roots
Short-term online loans company Wonga, based in London, has opened for business in South Africa, the home of its founders Errol Damelin and Jonty Hurwitz. The UK business has generated a lot of headlines, both good and bad.
The company has just launched a new business service in the UK – with the usual debates over the high level of interest levied (The men who made £50 million from other people’s cash woes is one typical example). So will the South African arm cause the same angst? Continue reading »
Cove’s gas find could fire up the bids
Cove Energy, the London-listed explorer that is on Royal Dutch Shell’s radar and attracting interest from Asia, may have just got a bit pricier.
The company announced on Tuesday that, together with operator Anadarko Petroleum, it has discovered a new natural gas field off Mozambique – a substantial find. So where does that leave the bidding? Continue reading »
Chart of the week: which way next for China’s trade surplus?
Another month, another alarming statistic from China. This month, amid all the other gloom, came the trade surplus.
It jumped from $5.3bn in March to $18.4bn in April. Not the right direction, certainly. But is there cause for alarm? And what is the long term pattern of China’s trade, anyway? Chart of the week takes a look. Continue reading »
EM ecommerce: without the plastic
What’s holding back ecommerce in EMs? Two answers normally crop up: a lack of reliable internet connections and a lack of credit and debit cards.
Well, perhaps not the second one so much. According to payment processing business Worldpay, alternative payments – ie those not involving credit or debit cards – are booming. And emerging markets are at the forefront. Continue reading »
Nigeria: Guinness downer
A reminder that Africa isn’t all about positive growth stories.
Guinness Nigeria announced on Thursday a steep fall in profits during the nine months to the end of March – a fall of 24 per cent compared with the same period a year earlier. The reasons? Some are in the company’s control, others not so much. Continue reading »
Asia PMIs: mixed signals
April’s purchasing managers indices from Markit/HSBC for emerging Asia provide something of a glass half-full/half-empty situation.
If any number over 50 (which separates expansion from contraction) is good news, then Asia-watchers can breathe something of a sigh of relief. But for the pessimists, compared to March’s data, the numbers are coming down. Continue reading »
China PMI: staying afloat
As Simon Rabinovich writes on FT.com, China’s official purchasing managers’ index for manufacturing rose to 53.3 in April, its highest level in more than a year – giving further hopes for a soft landing for the economy.
Here’s a chart that tells the story: Continue reading »
Chart of the week: India’s S&P warning doesn’t fit the EM rise
The news that rating agency Standard &Poor’s has put India on negative watch, with a possible downgrade to come, has caused some alarm.
With favourable demographics and growth at a rate the developed world can only dream of, an Indian downgrade doesn’t fit the EM script. What’s going on? Chart of the week takes a look. Continue reading »
Taiwan: back out of recession
Mild cheers from Taiwan on Monday: figures for the first quarter of 2012 show that the economy crept out of recession after two quarters of contraction.
So – brighter times ahead? Hard to say. HSBC said that GDP had likely bottomed out. But Capital Economics pointed out that “weakness overseas could easily derail the recovery”. Continue reading »
WPP plays EM alphabet soup
Beyondbrics is aware of the adage of throwing stones in glass houses – we’re rather wedded to the acronym brics, for one. But we still can’t help but smile at WPP’s quarterly trading statement.
Never shy of using a marketing-friendly term, WPP chief Sir Martin Sorrell has added Mist to the Brics, Civets, and Next11. Continue reading »
While markets and investors endlessly fret over European debt, it may have gone less noticed that credit matters a lot in Asia too. And – deep breaths – that debt compared to GDP is getting close to levels not seen since 1997: the year of the Asian debt crisis.
Before we hit the panic button, there are quite a few differences this time around. Let’s look at the analysis as outlined by HSBC’s Frederic Neumann in a research note. Continue reading »
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