Page 4 - bne_newspaper_May_31_2019

The Regions This Week
May 31, 2019 www.intellinews.com I Page 4
Central Europe
Former chief economist of SEB Bank Gitanas Nauseda won the Lithuanian presidential election, convincingly beating ex-finance minister Ingrid Simonyte 65.86% to 32.86% in the run-off vote. Lithuanians voted to elect a new president of their country, which has stayed a firm course on the EU and Nato under the incumbent “Iron Lady” Dalia Grybauskaite.
Hungarian businessman Jozsef Vida is to acquire Tv2's media portfolio pending approval by the Competition Office (GVH), the commercial television broadcaster said on Wednesday. Previously, Andy Vajna, the Hollywood producer and government commissioner for the film industry, who died
in January, acquired Hungary's second largest commercial broadcaster Tv2 in 2015.
Slovakia had the second fastest growing food prices in the EU in 2018. And food prices are continuing to grow quickly this year, despite
the recent cancellation of a special levy for retail chains, the Ministry of Agriculture said.
PPF Group that belongs to Czechia’s richest man Petr Kellner, completed the acquisition of a 2.5% stake in the Home Credit Group, from Emma Capital of Jiri Smejc. According to PPF's financial report 2018, the company received the last instalment of €130mn in May 2019.
The Polish budget posted a deficit of just PLN80mn (€18.6mn) in January-April,
the Ministry of Finance said. The figure is a considerable reduction of the end-March deficit figure that came in at PLN4.5bn. It also contrasts with a surplus of PLN9.3bn recorded in January- April 2018.
Estonian gross wages expanded 7.9% y/y in the first quarter, data from Statistics Estonia showed. The rate of expansion in the first quarter is a slight slowdown on the expansion of 8.9% y/y recorded in October-December.
Strong wage growth supports consumption, in turn providing fuel for economic expansion.
Czech beer company Plzensky Prazdroj sold
a record 11.5mn hectolitres of beer in 2018 in the Czech Republic and abroad, up by 4% year- on-year. Sales abroad stood at 4.3mn hectolitres, up by 4.5% y/y, the highest number in the company's history.
Extreme Digital is no longer the largest online retailer in Hungary. Webshop eMag, a unit of South Africa's Naspers, became Hungary's biggest online retailer in 2018, pushing long-time leader Extreme Digital into second place, while Media Markt came in third, GKI Digital said.
The Polish unemployment rate dropped 0.7pp y/y to 5.6% in April, Poland’s statistical office GUS said. The unemployment level was only lower in the early 1990s, after which market reforms pushed it to well above the 10% mark and further to the peak of 20.7% recorded in April 2003.
Construction costs in Latvia increased 4.2% y/y in April, driven by rising labour costs, data from of the Central Statistical Bureau (CSB) showed. The growth rate came in at 0.6pp below the annual growth recorded in March.
Slovakia’s economic sentiment indicator (ESI) three-month moving average dropped by 1.9 points m/m to 95.1 in May 2019, mostly due to a decrease in confidence in services, construction and partly in confidence in trade, the Slovak Statistics Office’s data showed.
Lithuanian retail sales growth came in at 10.2% y/y in April at calendar-adjusted constant prices, Statistics Lithuania reported. Calendar effects – the Easter spending season in particular – drove the April sales 2.7pp above the annual reading in March. That marks a continuation of the strong start to 2019 for the Lithuanian retail sector.