JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – Barclays PLC has agreed to pay Barclays Africa 12.8 billion rand ($988 million) to fund investments required to separate it from its African unit, Barclays Africa said on Thursday.
Sealing the separation agreement terms paves the way for the British bank to reduce its stake to below 50 percent under a strategy which will see it focus on the United States and Britain.
($1 = 12.9545 rand)
(Reporting by Tiisetso Motsoeneng; editing by Jason Neely)
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – Barclays Africa missed estimates with a 5 percent rise in annual profit on Thursday as higher interest rates at home and sluggish growth elsewhere on the continent hit consumption and investment spending.
The South African lender, majority owned by Barclays Plc, said diluted headline EPS came in at 17.69 rand in the year to end December.
This was slightly below the 17.95 rand estimate by Thomson Reuters’s StarMine SmartEstimates, which puts more weight on recent forecasts and those from historically accurate analysts.
Headline EPS is the primary measure of profit in South Africa that strips out certain one-off items.
Barclays Africa, along with rivals, has struggled to increase lending as slowing economic growth in many African markets tempers demand from corporate clients and rising interest rates at home hit consumption by retail customers.
Barclays Africa’s results come a year after its parent unveiled a major strategic overhaul that included plans to sell down its stake in the African unit to below 20 percent to focus on the United States and Britain.
Barclays Plc has already trimmed its interest in the South African bank to 50 percent from 62 percent in the open market via the Johannesburg stock exchange.
Barclays Africa’s Chief Executive Maria Ramos said she would issue an update on the company’s separation form Barclays Plc later in the day.
(Reporting by Tiisetso Motsoeneng; Editing by Ed Stoddard and Biju Dwarakanath)
TUNIS (Reuters) – Tunisia’s economic growth slowed to 1 percent in 2016 compared with 1.1 percent in the previous year, official figures showed on Tuesday.
The state statistics institute said the economic growth for the full year 2016 slowed because of a decline in the agricultural sector and in phosphate production.
Tunisia aims to achieve 2.5 percent growth in 2017
The North Africa state has been struggling with a fall in tourism revenues after two major attacks on foreign visitors in 2015. Strikes and protests over jobs also hit the state phosphate business, another government revenue earner.
(Reporting By Tarek Amara)
LAGOS (Reuters) – Nigeria wants to borrow at least $1 billion from the World Bank, Finance Minister Kemi Adeosun said on Tuesday.
Adeosun also told CNBC that Nigeria hoped to sign in the next few months a loan worth $1.3 billion from China’s Export-Import Bank (Exim) to fund railway projects in the West African nation.
(Reporting by Ulf Laessing and Oludare Mayowa; Editing by Gareth Jones)
LAGOS (Reuters) – Nigeria sees no need to apply for an International Monetary Fund programme as it is pursuing its own economic reform plan, Finance Minister Kemi Adeosun said on Tuesday.
Sharp falls in the price of crude oil, its main export, have tipped Africa’s biggest economy into its first recession for 25 years and hammered the naira currency, prompting speculation it might need IMF funding to cover a growing budget deficit.
“For us the IMF is really a lender of last resort when you have balance of payments problem. Nigeria doesn’t have balance of payments problems per se, it has a fiscal problem,” Adeosun told CNBC in an interview.
“We are already doing as much reform as any IMF programme would impose on Nigeria,” she said. “Nigerians want to take responsibility for their future. We must have our home-grown, home-designed programme of reform.”
Adeosun said non-oil revenues were improving while the government was fine-tuning an economic reform plan needed to support an application for a loan of at least $1 billion from the World Bank. It is also seeking further funds from the African Development Bank.
“Non-oil revenue is improving very steadily. All the measures we have put in place are beginning to yield fruits,” she said, without giving numbers.
“Oil production is back up, we are very grateful for that, but we should be careful for getting excited about that.”
Diplomats and officials have told Reuters the Nigeria, Africa’s leading crude producer, which relies on oil revenues for most of its income, plans to finalise its proposal to the World Bank this month.
The country needs to plug a gap in its record 7.3 trillion naira ($23.17 billion) 2017 budget, which contains a number of measures aimed at stimulating the economy.
It had initially promised to submit an economic plan to the World Bank by the end of December but did not do so, sources told Reuters last month.
Nigeria will also present its economic proposal to the African Development Bank to help release a second loan tranche worth $400 million to support the budget, officials have said.
($1 = 315.0000 naira)
(Reporting by Ulf Laessing and Oludare Mayowa; Editing by Catherine Evans)
ABUJA (Reuters) – Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari said there was no cause to worry about his health but he had to stay longer on medical leave in Britain than planned, the presidency said on Tuesday.
“During his normal annual checkup, tests showed he needed a longer period of rest, necessitating the President staying longer than originally planned,” the presidency said in a statement.
“President Buhari wishes to reassure Nigerians that there is no cause for worry,” it said.
(Reporting by Feix Onuah; Writing by Ulf Laessing; Editing by Dominic Evans)
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – South African Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan said on Monday he sees a “difficult political year” for the ruling African National Congress (ANC) but that he saw “green shoots” of growth in an economy that is barely growing.
The ANC has a major policy conference at the end of June and late this year will pick a new party leader to replace President Jacob Zuma as its candidate when his second term ends in 2019.
In an interview with the eNCA TV news channel before the unveiling of his annual budget on Wednesday, Gordhan said: “We seem to be improving slightly on the growth side, seeing some green shoots which we will describe for you on Wednesday.”
“At the same time we have our challenges,” he said, including: “A difficult political year for the ruling party which will create its own dynamics.”
Asked about fraud charges that were brought against him last year and then dropped, Gordhan said: “That kind of abuse is totally unacceptable in our kind of young democracy.”
That saga unsettled markets and led to speculation that Zuma and his allies wanted to remove Gordhan, who commands huge respect among investors.
Ratings agency Standard & Poor’s said last month that ANC infighting could derail government efforts to improve policy implementation and that Pretoria had little room to boost spending. South Africa risks having its debt downgraded to junk status.
There has been widespread media speculation that Zuma, who has called for “a new chapter of radical socio-economic transformation”, still wants to replace Gordhan.
The political noise comes against the backdrop of a tough economic situation.
In his October mid-term budget statement to parliament, Gordhan cut the 2016 economic expansion forecast to 0.5 percent from the 0.9 percent previously predicted by the Treasury, but said GDP growth would recover to 1.3 percent next year.
(Reporting by Ed Stoddard; Editing by Louise Ireland)
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – South Africa’s MTN has increased its investment in an Iranian e-commerce business, it said on Monday, without disclosing the size of the transaction.
MTN, Africa’s largest mobile phone company, told Reuters last year that it planned to expand in Iran, where it has a leading position but from which it has not been able to repatriate profits until recently due to U.S. sanctions.
MTN said its Iranian unit Irancell led a funding round for the Iran Internet Group (IIG) to accelerate the e-commerce group’s growth.
IIG runs Snapp.ir, a car-hailing platform which MTN last year backed with a $22 million investment, as well as online marketplace Bamilo.com and food-ordering service Zoodfood.com.
“Over the past two years we have seen incredible growth at IIG, and this investment by our local partner is testament to the strength of the group’s business model and management team”, MTN Chief Digital Officer Herman Singh said.
MTN, which set aside about $700 million in capital expenditure, part of it to revamp Iran’s network infrastructure, has said it is growing its extending its reach into the nation’s e-commerce rapidly particularly in retail and travel sectors.
(Reporting by TJ Strydom)
LUSAKA (Reuters) – Zambia’s economic growth is seen rising to 4 percent in 2017 and 4.2 percent in 2018, the World Bank said on Monday, predicting a jump in copper prices and improved power supply.
“Zambia is on a slow economic recovery path,” the World Bank’s senior financial management specialist Srinivas Gurazada said at a meeting with mining firms.
The government has forecast that the economy would grow 3.4 percent this year from around 3 percent last year due to low copper prices, power shortages, inflation and a government cash crunch that restricted investment into new projects.
(Reporting by Chris Mfula; Editing by James Macharia)
CAIRO (Reuters) – The Egyptian pound strengthened on Sunday, reaching a three month high, as importers’ demand for dollars at banks eased, bankers told Reuters on Sunday.
Banks were selling dollars at around 15.8 pounds per dollar on Sunday, stronger than Thursday’s rate of around 16 per dollar.
The central bank floated the currency and raised base interest rates by 3 percent in early November, encouraging the International Monetary Fund to agree a three-year $12 billion funding deal later that month.
“Importers have a pile up of goods. When the prices rose after the float, people’s purchasing power declined and sales in most (imported) goods slowed down and with it their demand for dollars to import more goods slowed as well,” one banker said.
Dollar inflows at banks have also increased as foreign investors, scared off by a revolution in 2011 that ushered in an era of instability, have begun to return, while dollar remittances from Egyptians living abroad have risen sharply.
Foreign investors, lured by high yields in Egyptian treasuries, entered the market in the past few weeks pushing yields lower.
(Reporting by Asma Alsharif; Editing by Mark Potter)
