CEE Equity

Globalworth Real Estate Investments, the London-listed real estate investment trust focused on commercial properties in Romania and Poland, is preparing to raise up to €276.45m of fresh equity to finance its bulging pipeline of acquisitions.

Samruk-Kazyna, Kazakhstan’s sovereign wealth fund, has offloaded a small part of its stake in Kazatomprom, the state-owned uranium mining company, via an accelerated bookbuild on Wednesday evening.

Kaspi.kz, the largest payments company in Kazakhstan, announced on Monday that it would proceed with an IPO on the London stock exchange after filing a registration document last week.

Kaspi.kz, the Kazakh payments group, is preparing to list global depositary receipts (GDRs) on the London Stock Exchange this autumn, as EM deals provide a brief glimmer of hope for the UK capital as Brexit volatility has killed the hopes of many UK issuers.

Emerging market equities have had a torrid few weeks as investors sell riskier assets over fears they will suffer if US-China trade tensions exacerbating a global economic slowdown. This has limited the supply of new deals from certain countries this year but as always in EM there are pockets of opportunity and this year’s success story has been Russia.

A number of highly anticipated emerging market IPO issuers are understood to have shifted listing plans to next year instead of the last quarter of 2019.

Ready and willing equity investors are facing another year of frustration in Russia, with the country's IPO activity set to underwhelm until 2020.

The sellers of Oltin, a closed-ended fund seeking to invest in Uzbekistan, have decided to postpone a public listing and proceed with private fundraising after investors expressed a preference for an unlisted fund structure.

Asset managers are looking to the emerging markets as a hedge against a slowdown in the US and Europe.

Investors in London have been considering the opportunity to invest in Uzbekistan this week, through a new closed-end fund, Oltin, the first internationally listed security giving investors exposure to the Central Asian republic.

In this round-up, Chinese securities regulators allow their Hong Kong counterpart to access audit papers of Hong Kong-listed mainland companies, Chinese premier Li Keqiang vowed to lift the 51% foreign ownership cap on Chinese financial firms sooner than planned, and free-trade zones (FTZs) receive more autonomy in trying out new policies.

Interest from Russian accounts drove a $400m sale in steel company NLMK Group last week, with local demand remaining strong in the country for the right sectors and stocks.