bankelele

• Sleeping giants may never wake (or reform)

  Posted: April 30, 2008, 11:00 pm by bankelele

  labour on Labour Day Sometimes I wonder if we are ever going to reform & develop, or if by being profitable and making money we see no need for some reforms - corporate, land, ICT, political or other. Rwanda is on the fast path to being an ICT powerhouse. They may get there, but we have the beach, undersea cable etc. - all we have to do is wait to benefit from them. Uganda and Sudan have oil –

• Kutwa Tuesday

  Posted: April 29, 2008, 10:38 pm by bankelele

  Revelations Chapter 11, verse 1 and 2: Hats off to the business daily for their exposes of the downfall of Francis Thuo stockbrokers. It is an anomaly that brokers don’t have to publish their accounts, oversee each others lapses and gallantly bail each other out, and that white collar crime is something only the faint hearted fail at (they even raided the stockbroker after the company died. I

• Saturday Reading

  Posted: April 26, 2008, 5:43 pm by bankelele

  ranks & references References: Looking for the latest fiction, biographies, financial or other reference books at the Book Villa? The Nairobi bookshop has moved to Norwich Union House 8th Floor (building houses Galitos/Chicken Inn on ground) Moi Avenue. New location is bigger and more spacious than the cramped old location and will soon have refreshments in a reading area with a great view of

• CMA 2008 Licensees

  Posted: April 25, 2008, 10:35 pm by bankelele

  not much change from last year (PDF) New stockbroker is Chartered Capital joining African alliance, Crossfield, Discount, Ngenye kariuki, Solid being taken over by NIC, Reliable, and Bob Matthews - missing is Nyaga stockbrokers Investment banks : African alliance, Apex Africa, Barclays Financial (dormant?) , CBA Capital, CFC financial, Dyer & Blair, Kestrel capital, Standard investment,

• IPO Guilt Part II: Rule of queues

  Posted: April 23, 2008, 4:38 pm by bankelele

  As I looked for place to pay for the shares today, I found lines around the block, and remember there were also some at 8 PM last night. On the way here I passed another (even longer) queue – the one outside Nation Center for customers of collapsed Nyaga Stockbrokers. I hope I’m wrong in my feeling that the NSE/CMA receivers will use their bounty raised from Safaricom IPO, to pay off these

• IPO Guilt

  Posted: April 22, 2008, 10:48 pm by bankelele

  I am - Guilty of having to get into an IPO queue after signaling a wavering of my IPO strategy (its political season) - Guilty of waiting till the last minute; procrastination is a Kenyan habit, and the queues of Safaricom are very long in the last 24 hours, despite the IPO having run for almost a month. What were we waiting for? (and does Obama carry this gene?) - Party guilty of not fully

• Motoring Moment

  Posted: April 21, 2008, 8:01 pm by bankelele

  - KQ Plane overshoots runway at Entebbe. No reported injuries - The Nairobi Star has a story about the Kenya Government not wanting to buy new limousines for ministers and the Prime Minister. Meanwhile the Uganda Government is selling 20 post CHOGM BMW jeeps – why not swop? Speaking of which, what happened to the stretch limos that former presidents Moi and Kenyatta used to use. They

• April 18: Mostly Equity Links

  Posted: April 18, 2008, 11:22 pm by bankelele

  KCB goes payday: with a salary advance product, that mimics one popular, silent, product of Equity Bank – the salary advance loan. KCB’s is up to 100,000 shillings ($1,600) or 50% of salary with no hidden charges - read more on pay day loans Equity niches: Equity has cut a niche for discovering new products – basically they see a gap and Kenyans with needs and they step forward and finance

• KCB goes upscale

  Posted: April 16, 2008, 6:31 pm by bankelele

  Joining the exodus of banks leaving the Nairobi CBD will be KCB, who will shift their headquarters from Kencom House to a yet to be complete building in Upper Hill - aka the capital of vision 2030 . They join Victoria, CBA, NIC, the World Bank, and a dozen insurance companies with their own buildings in a great part of town, but with no room for road expansion.

• NSE Briefs

  Posted: April 16, 2008, 2:18 pm by bankelele

  Scangroup: It was a pleasant surprise to pick up the newspaper this morning and see results from Scangroup (company earnings usually break at theNSE site) for the year ended in December 2007. Turnover was up from 3 billion to 4.7 shillings billion, and profit after tax was up from 279m to 353 million shillings (27%) as were EPS (1.48) and dividend per share of Kshs. 0.90 – which is not bad for

• Bank charges survey

  Posted: April 14, 2008, 1:05 pm by bankelele

  The Central Bank and FSD Kenya released a report on bank charges – a summarized version of which is now available from the CBK site. It is an interesting report based on a survey of several hundred bank customers. CBK used to publish bank charges every quarter in the newspapers from about 2003 to 2005, which were not clearly understood by the public then they appear to have decided to used FSD

• E-government and privacy

  Posted: April 14, 2008, 1:03 pm by bankelele

  Online IPO Registrations I applied online for my Safaricom IPO shares. There’s the offical site for the IPO registration that is very easy to use. Just type in your CDS number and ID number and ID/ passport number (that you used to open the CDS account) to get started ( it’s an indictment for investor education initiatives by the CMA that there are leaders and executives who still don’t know

• 2007 Kenya Bank Ranking Part III

  Posted: April 14, 2008, 1:01 pm by bankelele

  winners Asset growth 2006 – 2007 Equity 165% Family 57% DBK, City Finance 42% Diamond Trust 40% Fidelity 38% Then K-rep, Barclays, Stanbic, Prime, I&M Loan growth Equity 100% Stanbic 73% Chase 61% Family 59% DBK, Baroda 57% Then Diamond trust, Barclays, Fidelity, KCB, NIC Deposit growth City finance 131% yes but to 231m Equity 93% Diamond trust 45% Transnational 42% Fidelity 39% Then Credit,

• Regional IPO Tales

  Posted: April 10, 2008, 7:25 pm by bankelele

  Undugu gani huu?: One of my favorite entertainment sites is Bossip with its catchy headlines, like Making it Rain on These ****, Jesus Take The Wheel, and ** sit down, all of which apply in this case, but the best way to answer this story is BROTHER PLEASE! - while Uganda and Rwanda have joined thousands of Kenyans embracing the investment vehicle that is the Safaricom IPO, it appears the Bank

• IPO Tales: 13 days to go

  Posted: April 10, 2008, 12:37 pm by bankelele

  - Oversubscription: If 9 million Kenyans voted last year it's possible a ¼ of them will buy shares. Or that ½ the people with bank accounts will apply for shares. On that, with two weeks to go, new banks with IPO loans include KCB (Uganda), CFC and even high street CBA. Happy banks: Two banks may have crossed the 1 billion shilling mark for new IPO loans after just a week. They are also

• KQ's 787 dreams

  Posted: April 10, 2008, 12:22 pm by bankelele

  What seemed like a rough year for Kenya Airways year ended last week (March 31). Half year, pre tax profits were 2.8 billion shillings ($43 million) (down from 3.4 billion) the year before. They had lost a new 737-8 aircraft in a crash, had seen fuel reach record highs ($85 a barrel in September) and were being hammered by the strong shilling. Since then we had the dispted election and

• IPO Hard Choices

  Posted: April 7, 2008, 8:44 pm by bankelele

  It’s getting very hard to stick with my avowed IPO bypass plan with Safaricom. The market is so liquid now, and may dry up later, so why not take advantage of it now? Also I read one I-bank analysis of IPO’s in the last few years, that shows that all (except Eveready) have significantly out-performed their IPO price, and Safaricom is no Eveready. Still reading Maishinski comments here about

• Kenya 2007 Bank Ranking: Part II

  Posted: April 5, 2008, 9:16 pm by bankelele

  Return on Assets pre-tax profits Oriental 12.33% StanChart 5.37% Imperial 4.81% Bank of India 4.58% Barclays 4.48% Then Equity (4.45%), I&M, NBK, Credit Return on Equity StanChart 53.23% Bank of India 40.58% Barclays 38.73% CBA 38.71% KCB 38.45% Then Coop, Imperial, Stanbic, NBK, I&M Loans to deposits ratio DBK 153% K-Rep 114% Middle East 99% Barclays 97% NIC 90% Then Housing Finance,

• One week gone

  Posted: April 4, 2008, 10:08 pm by bankelele

  The Safaricom IPO is one week old today IPO briefs - Reason #1 to have government as a shareholder = tax breaks!: Not that Safaricom needs any, but the increase in share capital to Kshs. 6 billion has been exempted from stamp duty by the Finance Minister – saving the company about 6 million shillings ($94,000) - Across the border: From Uganda we hear that Dyer & Blair is selling the shares at

• Kenya Bank Rankings for 2007

  Posted: April 3, 2008, 6:06 pm by bankelele

  the basics Assets Barclays Kenya 157,928 [i.e. 158 billion shillings, ~ $2.43 billion] Kenya Commercial 112,211 Standard Chartered 91,252 Cooperative 65,697 Equity 53,129 Citibank Kenya 47,301 National Bank of Kenya 41,414 Commercial Bank of Africa 39,509 Stanbic 34,464 * NIC 31,396 Diamond Trust 30,313 [30.3 billion, ~$466 million] Investment & Mortgages 29420 CFC 28,020 * Baroda 14,709

• IPO Train: full on board

  Posted: April 1, 2008, 2:47 pm by bankelele

  It’s now the fourth official day of the Safaricom IPO, with some banks and brokers working over 7 days processing applications. And, over the weekend, many of the negatives of the IPO turned into positives; Politics align: The IPO was launched last Friday by President Mwai Kibaki, who placed a personal application for 1 million shares, worth 5 million shillings ((0.01% of the shares on offer)

Blah blah blah

Fish cakes

Alas a fish cake.

Yet more fish cakes

Guess what ... yeah ... fish cakes.

The end of the fish cakes