The African Markets, Technology and Venture Capital

Here the KenGen 10 year public infrastructure bond offer Information Memorandum

Plans are to be underway to unbundle CFC Stanbic holdings and potentially create more value for investors.

CFCStanbic is the holding company of: CFC Stanbic Bank Limited, CFC Stanbic Financial Services Limited, CFC Life Assurance Limited and The Heritage Insurance Company Limited .

This might be done by CFCStanbic offloading some of its shareholding in Heritage Insurance and CFC Life and listing these as separate entities, or even merging both and lisiting them as a separate general Insurance business.
The group plans to do this by offloading some of their stake to a strategic Investor.

Standard Bank Group the parent of CFCStanbic is the largest South African banking group ranked by assets and earnings and operates a financial services supermarket in South Africa, with interests in Insurance through Liberty Life and could possibly introduce it in Kenya by chopping up CFCStanbic, and reinvesting in them through Liberty Life.

CFC Stanbic was formed in June 2008 out of a merger of Stanbic Bank Kenya and CFC Bank. The entity is now Kenya’s  fourth largest bank measured by total assets.
CFCStanbic bank reported a 5 percent rise in pretax profit for the first half of 2009.
While CFC Stanbic Financial Services reported a Sh51 million loss for the first six months of 2009 .

I will closely watch this transaction toas my hodling in this company have been under water for sometime now.

Find here the Cautionary Statement provided by the group MD.
And here for the Half year finacial results released recently.
Fact Sheet on Standard Bank Group.

Note: I hold shares in CFC Stanbic

Statement from KenolKobil .

Technology group Altech said it has acquired an 8.5% stake in the East Africa Marine System (Teams) data cable via its subsidiary Kenya Data Networks (KDN).
The 5 000km, $130m undersea fibre-optic cable project is being spearheaded by the Kenyan government and stretches from Mombasa to Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates.

The $11m investment by Altech KDN bought it a 10% voting right along with the effective 8.5% equity stake in Teams. Altech said it will fund its portion of the purchase price from cash reserves.

Said Altech CEO Craig Venter: “Africa is in the infancy stages of a sustained growth trajectory in broadband across multiple technologies, services and geographies. The acquisition of a stake in Teams complements KDN’s strategy of being a cross-border, Pan African network operator.

“Shareholders in Teams will be allocated cable capacity proportionate to shareholding. KDN’s stake will thus grant us access to additional bandwidth, provision for redundancy of broadband connectivity and significantly increase KDN’s service quality, all the while unlocking a wide range of additional services for the group as a whole,” he said.

KDN is 60.8% held by Altech. (Merali seems to have sold down his stake considerably.)

Altech said that, with terrestrial fibre laid in Kenya, Uganda and soon Rwanda, the acquisition of a stake in Teams is a perfect fit for KDN’s plans.

In August 2008, KDN became the first ICT company to construct a termination point at the Kenyan coast in anticipation of the landing of East Africa’s three international undersea cables.

KDN said its fibre-optic cable will connect the undersea cables that land in Mombasa to the rest of East Africa, creating a five-country, fibre-optic terrestrial network linking Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and the DRC.
Altech also predicted cost savings from the investment.
It said the price for satellite connectivity is $1 900 per Mbps per month in Africa, whereas the expected price for submarine cable connectivity drops dramatically to $90 per Mbps per month. This cost is anticipated to decline even further to $27 per Mbps per month by 2020.

-Courtesy of Fin24.com

Is Merali selling off most of his investments, he is now only holding a 5% stake in Zain.
Who says South African firms are not taking over and being successful in a few industries in Kenya.

The new Complaints Handling Unit by the NSE was set up today.
The promise is that they will solve our problems and fast at that.

Investors now have a one stop point of reference to have their problems received and resolved quickly and efficiently. The Complaints Handling Unit (CHU) is centralised and automated system that ensures issues are handled fast. he Nairobi Stock Exchange(NSE) in collaboration with the Capital Markets Authority (CMA) and the Central Depository and Settlement Corporation (CDSC) have come together to make your stock market experience positive and problem free.

Log onto: http://complaints.nse.co.ke
Call: 020 2831000 Fax: 020 2224200
Here is the speech by the NSE chairman Eddy Njoroge during the Launch of Complaints Handling Unit (CHU).

Lets hope this initiative is for real and does not die out as investors start trickling back to the NSE.
All in all its a good step if all departments actually action the queries as people log them.

The Central Bank of Nigeria has moved to inject N400 billion(about $2.5Bn) into five banks in the country following the decision to remove the CEOs and executive directors of the affected banks. The affected institutions are Intercontinental Bank Plc, Union Bank of Nigeria Plc, OceanicInternational Bank Plc, Finbank Plc and Afribank Plc.

The CEOs that have been sacked by the CBN are Erastus Akingbola(Intercontinental Bank); Okey Nwosu (Finbank); Sebastian Adigwe(Afribank); Mrs Cecelia Ibru (Oceanic Bank); and Bartholomew Ebong(Union Bank). The CBN governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, who made this decision known this morning at the Emergency Bankers’ Committee convened by the CBN in Lagos, explained exclusively to THISDAY that the decision was being taken to safeguard the financial sector from systemic collapse.He said following the audit exercise conducted by CBN’s examiners it was discovered that five of the banks had accumulated margin loans of N500billion, among other loans, that had gone bad and eroded their shareholders’ funds.

“Some of these banks are quite large institutions and they have been mismanaged, so we had to move in to send a strong signal that such recklessness on the part of bank executives will no longer be tolerated.”He said the CBN had obtained the approval of the President to inject N400 billion into the affected banks to shore up their tier 2 capital to minimum acceptable levels.
Sanusi added that the funds being injected by the CBN was just temporary and does not translate to the government taking a stake in the five banks, as the interim management will be given a period to recapitalise the affected institutions, following which the N400 billion will be paid back to the CBN.
On how the CBN will prevent a run on the banks and create panic in the economy, Sanusi said the CBN intends to make it clear that the money being injected by the reserve bank as well as the decision to guarantee interbank placement should allay depositors’ concerns.The CBN, he stated, stands ready to ensure that no bank collapses in the country, but will encourage them to seek for funds to raise fresh capital and merge with stronger banks.He said an interim management and board for the affected banks will be put in place to run the institutions until they are taken over by new management teams and owners.

The Riba Take:
Margin Loans: Are loans given to investors to buy shares in the stock market, the shares act as collateral for the money borrowed. What went wrong in Nigeria is that the market which 2 years(or about that) back was among the best performing globally in terms of returns collapsed and at some point the govt even had to intervene by putting interim measure preventing shares from depreciating by a certain percentage within a day, almost similar to the margins we have in Kenya, but these were more stringent due to the nature of the collapse and the fact a very huge number of Nigerians were investing heavily in the market especially after the famous bank mergers and reorganization.

When the banks called on these loans people started defaulting and this downward spiral has taken its toll on these five institutions, but rest assured this is just the first group of banks, more will be disclosed.

A weird step the Nigerian govt had taken was to prevent banks from disclosing how much of margin loans they had on their books, thus further putting away investors especially in bank stocks and thus further depressing their prices downwards, and in turn more margin loans being defaulted on.

This step will definitely lead to a run on some of these banks, and a further downward spiral of banking stocks in particular which were the star performers in the boom times.

Lets wait as this story develops further………