Category Archives: Nairobi Stock Exchange

EFG Hermes launches online trading in Kenya

Kenya’s leading stockbroker, EFG Hermes has launched One, a new online platform that enables retail investors to trade shares on the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE).

EFG Hermes One, the equities trading platform will be available to clients of the stockbroker. The One app has been very successful in other markets, notably in Vietnam and the firm hopes to capitalize on the high mobile phone density in Kenya, reported at 108%. 

Speaking at the launch, the CEO of the NSE Geoffrey Odundo said that Kenya has an active retail investor base as seen with M-Akiba, a government bond issued and traded on mobile phones that drew 500,000 investors. He added that the new NSE platform has the ability for “day-trading” and “short-selling” and those would be products that appeal to retail investors.

Muathi Kilonzo, Head of Equities at EFG Hermes Kenya said that retail investors across the globe showed great activity in powering different equities and investments markets while the world was slowed by Covid-19.

Ali Khalpey, the CEO of Frontier Markets, said EFG Hermes started in Egypt 35 years ago and had grown to have 5,500  employees and offices in Egypt, Dubai, Nigeria, Kuwait, USA, Oman, UK, Kenya, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan offering stockbroking, investment banking, asset management, securities brokerage, research, and private equity services.

In 2017, EFG Hermes launched a greenfield operation in Kenya that has grown to be the top stockbroker by value traded on the Nairobi Securities Exchange in 2021. Last year it was acclaimed as the top frontier research institution and the best broker in Kenya and Nigeria. It produces highly prized research reports on frontier markets with recent ones on Kenyan banks, the silicon savannah potential and digitizing COVID-19 stimulus initiatives.

Download the One app from the Apple app store and Google play store, register to be an EFG Hermes client, and get on board after a regulator-mandated, know-your-customer (KYC) process.

Homeboyz Entertainment at the NSE

A peek at the prospectus of Homeboyz Entertainment that was released after their listing at the NSE

Monday, December 21 saw a brave move by Homeboyz Entertainment to list on the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) by introduction. The Homeboyz board approved the listing on the growth enterprise markets segment (GEMS) of the NSE back in February 2020, just before Covid hit the entertainment industry and the company now projects a 68% decline in their business this year due to Covid.

With the listing of 63.2 million shares at Kshs 4.66 per share, the twenty-five-year-old company becomes the first pure entertainment company on the NSE. Homeboyz was one of the companies in the NSE’s Ibuka program which it joined in May 2019 and has now graduated from. The event comes a few days after the NSE and CMA approved the listing.

  • Ownership and management: Homeboyz share capital is Kshs 31.6 million divided into 63.2 million shares. Owners are Myke Rabar, the co-founder and CEO with 35.6 million shares (56.4%), Rose Maina, the finance and administration director, with 27.5 million shares (43.6%), and John Rabar 20,000 (0.03%). A debt owed to the directors of Kshs 11.6 million was converted to equity in a share split ahead of the listing in November 2020. The three are directors along with Humphrey Wattanga (Chairman), Joe Otin and Stephen Gugu and the firm has 55 employees.
  • Turnover in 2019 was Kshs 311 million and in 2018 it was Kshs 346 million.  Interestingly, a majority of their revenue comes from their soundtracks business (earn Kshs 120 – 130 million every year from Soundtraxx), while events management and equipment leasing have fluctuated as they are more competitive. The company had a pre-tax profit of Kshs 38.9 million in 2019 and in 2018 was a loss of 9.7 million.
  • Have recent contracts with the Kenya Revenue Authority, State House, Kenya Open Golf  Kenya Rugby League, Football Kenya Federation, Sports Loto, and E-Sport Kenya Federation. In the past, they have partnered with UK’s Tiger Aspect Production on Tinga Tinga Tales TV series and now have another deal with Warner Bros for a video game called Pamoja Mtaani. 
  • Their brands include Swype (a payment gateway), Homeboyz Aktivate (experiential marketing), Music Technology Academy (a school for DJs), Y-HUB (online learning) and Fixxit. They also partnered with Publicis Africa Group in 2016, one of the world’s largest communications agencies.
  • Directors have a similar shareholding in Homeboyz Holdings Ltd while at Homeboyz Radio 2017 Ltd, Radio Africa owns 51% of the radio business.
  • They bought a bottled water company for Kshs 100 million in 2009 and divested from it in 2011.
  • Bank at Habib Zurich, NCBA and Bank of Africa. Their main financing is now with Bank of Africa who Homeboyz have asset finance and overdraft facilities that are enjoying a Covid moratorium up to March 2021.
  • Listing fees are Kshs 9.1 million and include payments to the nominated advisor of Kshs 2.1 million (AIB-AXYS), transaction advisor 2.1M (Horizon Africa Capital), and legal advisor 2.8M (MMC Asafo). The auditor is Matengo & Associates.

AFMI 2020 shows African financial markets resilience

The findings of the 2020 African Financial Markets Index (AFMI) report were highlighted in Nairobi today for a year in which countries face economic and medical challenges from COVID-19.

The fourth edition of the AFMI report by the Absa Group and the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF) now measures 23 countries that encompass two-thirds of the continent’s population and 80% of its GDP. The countries are ranked by six assessments of investment attractiveness and this year, Eswatini, Lesotho and Malawi were added to the Index. 

South Africa remained on top, followed by Mauritius, and surprisingly Nigeria, which, along with Morocco, Ghana and Seychelles, made great strides to improve. Kenya, which was number three in 2019, dropped to number seven this year. Overall, 14 of the 23 countries scored above the median mark, a great improvement from the first index when only 6 of the 17 countries achieved this.

COVID-19 has had different impacts on African countries, but as Jeremy Awori Absa Kenya CEO said, even with the slowed-growth in the first half of the year, much was still expected from the continent that has a rising middle-class, and rising urban population. He added that growth would come from developing open, transparent and well-regulated financial markets.

Absa Economist, Jeff Gable said Africa cited some developments on the continent towards financial inclusion and making exchanges accessible to retail investors. These included Eswaitni’s automated trading platform and the Nairobi Securities Exchange’s revamped mobile app for retail investors with Dar es Salaam also working on a similar one. He spoke of moves to encouraging more funds to invest within the continent that saw Lesotho require its pension fund managers to invest locally (currently just 3% of assets are in the country), the launch of a derivatives market in Nigeria, and Ethiopia drafting legislation for a stock exchange.

In terms of sustainable finance, Kenya had its first green bond, Egypt had the first one in the MENA region, and Nigeria is working on its third green bond. Also, the African Development Bank was one of the first institutions to issue a financial instrument to fight the COVID-19 pandemic as it issued a $3 billion social-bond tranche. 

Danae Kyriakopoulou of OMFIF spoke of Kenya’s drop which was mainly in the “access to foreign exchange” measure where which it was ranked tenth after having topped the pillar just two years ago. This was partly due to the perception of the currency exchange rate. And on market transparency, she said that Kenya has few firms that have global credit ratings, compared to Nigeria, South Africa, and Mauritius.

She added that a strong local investor base was a source of long-term capital and a financial markets shock absorber of volatility, and that Namibia has the highest pension assets under management per capita on the index.  In terms of protection of minority shareholders, Kenya does well on that but it also needs to adopt enforcement of international financial master agreements (ISDA) as a key area of improvement. Kenya is also part of a pilot Africa Exchange Linkages Project to promote intra-African investment flows between the stock exchanges of Nairobi, Johannesburg, Casablanca, Egypt, Nigeria, Mauritius and the BRVM in West Africa.

George Asante, Head of Global Markets at Absa, said that the impact of COVID-19 was not as drastic on African financial markets as they had developed more resilience through having regulators work in uniform. This was in comparison to the 2008 global financial crisis which had a big disruption on African markets resulting in bond yields shooting up 30%. But he cautioned that African governments should work hard to remove the uncertainties that are still in the prices of their bonds, to attain lower borrowing costs in future.

The 2020 AFMI report by Absa Group and OMFIF can be downloaded here.

Nairobi Stockbroker Moment: Changes in 2020

  • African Alliance Kenya Investment Bank announced its exit from stockbroking, to focus on asset management, digital and treasury business. Clients are to transfer their CDS accounts to other stockbrokers by July 22. It will continue to operate as a licensed investment bank and fund manager and plans to launch several new funds. 
  • AIB Capital and Apex Africa are finalizing a deal announced in February 2020 to merge their stock-broking, bond-trading, derivatives, research and corporate finance businesses that will operate as AIB-AXYS Africa. To effect this, all Apex Africa capital accounts will migrate to AIB by June, without disrupting services, and AIB Capital will move to Apex Africa premises in Westlands, Nairobi.
  • Genghis Capital and EGM Securities have announced a partnership to give investors a wider range of alternative asset classes including online currencies, commodities, precious metals, oil, and biotech company stocks. EGM runs FX Pesa and the partnership, which is on a revenue share basis, envisions enabling Genghis clients to purchase shares of Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook, Zoom, Moderna and Gilead Sciences. 
  • NSE App: Finally the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) has also launched online share trading through a new app that enables people to open CDS accounts on their phones and start trading listed company shares. The app, available on Android and iPhone, makes it easier to get live share prices, and view data of ongoing trade activity, with personalized notifications, chats, and financial news. 
  • NSE Training: The NSE has also been conducting investment training classes virtually to show people how to invest online, open accounts, choose stockbrokers, manage portfolios, and invest in derivatives.  
  • CMA stats: Statistics from the Capital Markets Authority (CMA) show that Nairobi had a net outflow by foreign investors worth Kshs 11 billion in the first quarter of 2020, compared to inflows of Kshs 601 million in the first quarter of 2019. 

Also:  

  • Market capitalization was down 15% down to Kshs 2 trillion, from 2.3 trillion in Q1 2019. CMA stats also show that while Kenyan equity trades in the first quarter of 2020 were down 5% compared to the previous year, in (much smaller) Uganda and Tanzania, trades were up astronomically, by 315% and 433%, respectively.
  • Ultimately, Nairobi stockbrokers need a new IPO to fuel investor interest in the trading shares, and it should probably be through a huge government privatization on par with Safaricom, which the last major government IPO in 2008. Since then there have been IPO’s from Co-op Bank, British American (2011), the NSE itself in 2014, and the Stanlib Fahari I-REIT (2015).
  •  On the derivatives counter, introduced in 2019, there was 47% more activity in Q1 2020 to compared to Q4 in 2019. KCB was the most active (138 contracts worth Kshs 6.6 million), followed by Safaricom and Equity Bank. Meanwhile,  the New Gold ETF is 93% traded by foreign investors.  NSE stats show that AIB is the leading arranger of NSE futures deals, doing about 41% of deals worth 5.2 million, followed by Sterling Capital (28%) and Standard Investment Bank (9%).
  • Collective investment schemes currently have 52% of their portfolios in government securities, 26% in fixed deposits and 12% (Kshs 9.2 billion) in listed NSE firms.  

7th BAFM – Building African Financial Markets – Day Two

Summary of day one of the BAFM.  

The second day of the 7th BAFM – Building African Financial Markets seminar continued with more explanations on changes in the global scene and how they could affect African exchanges.

Michele Carlsson of Nasdaq said immediate top compliance concerns were the need to fully understanding regulations and how they affect exchanges, and the inability of technology to meet current market requirements. She said it was important for exchanges to have market surveillance systems that could look at several assets classes, do powerful visualizations, have flexible alerting, and enable real-time controls as well as being scalable and resilient.

Anne Clayton of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange spoke on the impact that various new European Union regulations that could have on African capital markets. These include rules on general data protection (GDPR, May 2018), benchmark regulation (BMR – Jan 2018), financial instruments regulations (MiFID II –  Jan 2018) and others on derivatives trading. She explained that data on GDPR, EU citizens had to be notified of data breaches and they also the right to be forgotten if they requested it i.e. to have all their data wiped out from a system  – .but that is in conflict with “know your customer” (KYC) and “anti-money laundering” (AML) laws, which require that financial data, is kept for seven years.  African exchanges have low liquidity and the costs of compliance keep going up, now estimated at 5-10% of turnover, even where there is no uptake of products or use of some of the new rules. Many of them have low liquidity and are heavily dependent on foreign investors to provide liquidity, but such investors are sensitive to any policy or taxes which can make them shift to other markets. But non-compliance could result in heavy penalties for companies.

Dr. Anthony Miller spoke of new opportunities from linking exchanges to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through new products. Last week Fiji launched a green bond at the London Stock Exchange while there was a gender bond floated in Asia to support women funded entrepreneurs. This is at a time that companies like Bloomberg are tracking the growth of green funds around the world, while many other investors are eliminating carbon investments, like coal, from their portfolios.

Block chain and bitcoin were top topics of discussion on day two of the BAFM. One talk was an explanation on the different aspects of block chain technology, which could offer African institutions the ability for Africa to leapfrog old hurdles. Sofie Blakstad spoke of using block chain to provide cheaper rural financing that is much cheaper than from commercial banks, and that the technology also enabled an unprecedented level of validation of the impacts of targeted funding programs such as micro-finance institutions  e.g. how ethical or green their funding programs are, by looking at data from the beneficiaries.

(Away from the BAFM, on the same day, Juliani, a popular Kenyan gospel musician launched Juliani “Hela” a loyalty point-based currency earned by customers on every purchase of an official Juliani event ticket, a T-shirt, or album).

David Wagemma spoke about M-Akiba which was the first mobile-traded government bond in the world that cost Kenyan investors just $30 and which took five minutes to sign up and pay for, all via their mobile phones.

Later in a panel on block-chain as a disruptive technology for markets, Abubakar Mayanja said that progressive regulators should have sandbox licensing so that regulation goes on even as new ideas are developed, while Reggie Middleton, said the 1,500 cryptocurrencies in existence could grow on their own without needing each other and they did not need to concern central bankers and regulators in Africa as they had nothing to do with currencies.

In their remarks to close the event, Geoffrey Odundo, CEO of the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE), thanked organizers, saying that the BAFM had trended for two days and he saw that even the Deputy President was still following the conversation, while Oscar Onyema, President of African Securities Exchanges Association (ASEA)  said that this had been the best event in the BAFM series, with the next one to be hosted by the BRVM in Ivory Coast in April 2019 – who would be challenged to excel of the Nairobi event

Day two of the 7th Building African Financial Markets seminar was held at the Villa Rosa Kempinski Hotel in Nairobi Kenya on April 20, 2018.