IPO hangover: Went to visit stockbroker today in an unsuccessful search for the elusive Housing Finance prospectus – and instead found several notices on the wall:
– no mas they have suspended opening new CDS or receiving transfers from other stockbrokers for a month to 30/6( until they sort out their applications post-Safaricom IPO applications)
– investor awareness they advise how investors can watch rogue trades in their accounts and how to report them including getting correct address in the system. They also assure customers they are with a solid stockbroking firm that has over 40 billion shillings in assets
– cost increases – nominee accounts will now attract quarterly fee and transaction fees over and above commissions costs
– 1/2 way to DRIP: they will no longer en-cash dividend cheques, but they can be endorsed towards new purchases of shares.
Oil and manufacturing: Looking at the price warning from Sameer Africa, makes one wonder about the impact that the escalating price of oil will have on manufacturing based company shares (e.g. cement is up about 40%) – and whether it is wiser to invest in ‘service’ companies like Safaricom whose impact from oil prices will less direct (share of wallet)
Full year results
– Safaricom revenue to 61.4 billion [$990 million] (up 29%)
– Safaricom pre tax profit 19.9 billion [$321 million] (up 16%)
Petro Politics & Policy: Reading Thomas Freidman’s columns can scare any one cares about the future of America, foreign policy relations and other manufacturing industries.
Writing recently, he notes:
– The failure of Mr. Bush to fully mobilize the most powerful innovation engine in the world — the U.S. economy — to produce a scalable alternative to oil has helped to fuel the rise of a collection of petro-authoritarian states — from Russia to Venezuela to Iran — that are reshaping global politics in their own image.
– If this huge transfer of wealth to the petro-authoritarians continues, power will follow. According to Congressional testimony Wednesday by the energy expert Gal Luft, with oil at $200 a barrel, OPEC could “potentially buy Bank of America in one month worth of production, Apple computers in a week and General Motors in just three days.”
– America has taken its many natural assets — its research universities, free markets and diversity of human talent — and assumed that they will always compensate for our low savings rate or absence of a health care system or any strategic plan to improve our competitiveness.
– “Call it the triple deficit,” said Mr. Rothkopf. “A fiscal deficit that will soon have us choosing between rationed health care, sufficient education, adequate infrastructure and traditional levels of defense spending, a trade deficit that has us borrowing from our rivals to the point of real vulnerability, and a geopolitical deficit that is a legacy of Iraq, which may result in hesitancy to take strong stands where we must.”
