Business & Finance

Iran Can't Just Open the Oil Spigot

23 January 2016
Energy companies won't rush to invest billions in the Islamic Republic

July 18, 2015

The biggest ripple for investors from the landmark July 14 agreement that could free Iran from international economic sanctions in return for curtailing its nuclear program will be felt in the oil markets. They didn’t take the news well. The price of Brent crude fell 2.5%, to $57.06 a barrel, from what was already close to a four-month low, before falling a bit further later in the week.

China's Internet Stocks May Be Oversold

23 January 2016
Baidu, Tencent and others may rebound from the broader market rout

July 11, 2015 2:22 a.m. ET

Chinese Internet companies, led by search provider Baidu and wide-ranging conglomerate Tencent Holdings, held their value for nearly a month after the broader Chinese market started crumbling in late May, and with good reason. These two fast-growing giants, along with Chinese e-commerce king Alibaba Group Holding and its upstart rival JD.com, are listed on U.S. and Hong Kong exchanges. They are bought by global tech investors a world away from the mom-and-pop Chinese punters who have been borrowing money to gamble on little-known companies traded in Shanghai or Shenzhen.

 

Raiffeisen Bank Shrinks to Fit the New Eastern Europe

17 June 2015
Austria's Raiffeisen Bank International outraced competitors into Russia and Ukraine. Now it needs to rethink.
One More Retreat from Russia?

Foreigners over the centuries have found it easier to enter Eastern Europe than to extricate themselves from it. Vienna–based Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI) is learning this painful historical lesson anew.

Austrian banks naturally leapt at the chance to expand eastward after the Berlin Wall and Soviet Communism fell. Erste Bank and Bank Austria (since acquired by Italy’s UniCredit) dueled Raiffeisen for market share across the former Warsaw Pact. But RBI ranged farthest and most aggressively of all, establishing itself as the largest foreign bank in both Russia and Ukraine, with the former as its top profit center.

India E-tailing Gets Big, and Burns Cash, Fast

11 June 2015
The world's sleeping digital giant is waking up. And coming soon to an IPO near you.
Flipkart, India's Amazon, is on the Move

June 12, 2015

Evolving technology promises to revolutionize the way a vast nation shops and communicates. Online merchants’ sales grow geometrically, as do their losses. Investment banks proclaim they have seen the future, and it works with eye-popping stock-market multiples. Tech investors may feel like they have seen this movie before, but the backdrop is new: India.

Rotten broadband networks and dodgy electricity have kept India, population 1.25 billion, as the world’s sleeping digital giant, despite its depth of engineering talent. A leap forward in cellular, with smartphones selling as cheap as $40 and 3G rates dropping steeply, is set to change all that. The value of goods sold online will double this year to $7 billion, and keep on multiplying to $220 billion by 2030, Goldman Sachs projected in a report last month.

Petrobras Regains Market Favor; Now Comes the Hard Part

02 June 2015
Recent disclosures have eased fears about the kickback scandal, but the company still grapples with debt and heavy development costs.
No Smiles Yet at the Brazilian Oil Giant

 

After years in the financial wilderness because of its mounting debt and widening corruption scandal, Petróleo Brasileiro is showing signs of recovery.

In late April the giant state-owned oil company issued a long-delayed fourth-quarter 2014 earnings report and sought to draw a line under its troubles by taking a 44.6 billion real ($14.1 billion) write-down for overvalued assets and an additional 6.2 billion reais for costs related to the alleged graft. “We have made our best efforts to turn the page on this sad chapter that the company has passed through,” chief executive Aldemir Bendine, who came on board in February, told reporters after the announcement.

Egyptian IPOs. Really?

11 May 2015
Cairo has healthy companies in the pipeline, if the bureaucrats don't mess it up.
Waiting on Big Numbers in Cairo. Photo by Shawn Baldwin, Bloomberg

The Egyptian Exchange roared back to life in 2013 and 2014, with its benchmark EGX 30 index doubling in the 18 months following the July 2013 coup that removed President Mohamed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood government from power. The military-backed regime of his successor, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, cashed in on that optimistic tide last September, raising 61 billion Egyptian pounds ($8 billion) from its own population through a bond issue to finance expansion of the Suez Canal.

Russia Prepares for an Endless Crisis

26 April 2015
A year after grabbing Crimea, economic stagnation is Russia's new normal.
Drawing by Renaud Vigourt

INSTITUTIONAL INVESTOR

APRIL 27, 2015

A Russian analyst who has monitored corporate credit for the past decade at a Big Three rating agency in Moscow still maintains the habits of the go-go years,enjoying a steak tartare lunch at a plush restaurant just off the capital’s Garden Ring, but his outlook for the country is grim — and not only in economic terms. He worries about the official media’s increasing focus on a “fifth column” supposedly seeking to undermine Russia from within, and about events like the 35,000-strong February march in Moscow, encouraged by the government, that was directed against “internal enemies.” Such efforts to stifle dissent and rally support for the government’s policies toward Ukraine could metastasize into a modern version of Stalinism, he warns.

Time to Buy Iran? Not Quite Yet

26 March 2015
"It's like Turkey with 9% of the world's oil," one banker raves. But investors are in no rush to Tehran.
Axis of Profit?

Iran: The Next Frontier?

Bibi Netanyahu and most of the U.S. Congress may still view Iran as an axis of evil. But a few brave analysts are starting to pitch it as something else: the next great emerging market. “Iran is the largest economy in the world by far that remains cut off from global markets,” says Charles Robertson, chief economist of Renaissance Capital, a London-based investment bank that had a good run in Russia and now wants to expand across the Middle East and Africa. “It’s like Turkey, but with 9% of the world’s oil reserves.”

The Verdict of Global Markets on Ukraine: We Don’t Care

19 March 2015
Some analysts are negative on emerging markets — but for reasons other than the crisis between Russia and Ukraine.

In this era of instant financial and economic contagion, a butterfly’s wing flapping in Greece or Thailand can send reverberations through stock exchanges in New York and London. Yet world markets have shrugged off a disturbance of potentially historic proportions during the past few weeks: Russia’s annexation of the Ukrainian province of Crimea and the resulting revival of cold war–style tensions between Moscow and the West. “Except for the Russian and Ukrainian markets themselves, this is basically a nonevent,” says Melissa Brown, senior director of applied research at New York–based risk analytics and financial data firm Axioma, which studies equity and currency volatility around the world.

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