Page 86 - RusRPTMay19

Russia since the beginning of 2019. While not a single IPO or SPO was seen in 2018, but since the start of this year a number of companies have announced deals including Polyus Gold which raised $390mn from a placement and rail operator RusTransCom that announced IPO plans, among others.
Russia and Turkey will create a joint investment fund for €900mn, Head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) Kirill Dmitriev told reporters. "Today we will announce that we have finally created a Russian-Turkish investment fund. We worked on it for a long time and, there was a lot of discussion, and finally we created it. It is 900mn euro. And we see that it will be extremely important to revitalize the Russian-Turkish investment," he said.
Russian multi-industry holding AFK Sistema expects successful IPOs of its second-tier, but fast-growing assets Steppe agricultural holding and Segezha Group pulp and paper producer, the president of the holding Andrei Dubovskov is cited by Prime as saying. Sistema wants in on the wave of equity deals that is building up since the beginning of 2019 in Russia. While 2018 did not see a single equity offering, the market is slowly coming back to life with a number of deals already announced in 2019.
Russian multi-industry investment conglomerate AFK Sistema says it plans to IPO its pharmaceutical asset OBL Pharm (Obolenskoye) that was merged with Binnophafm, without providing the timeline for the initial public offering. After not a single IPO has been held in Russia in 2018, a number of companies have already lined up initial and secondary public offerings on a favourable market. Sistema acquired 11.7% in OBL Pharma in December 2018 for RUB1.83bn, jointly with a consortium of VTB Bank and OBL Pharm's management buying 95.14% in the company for RUB15.5bn. Sistema planned to merge the asset with Binnopharm in which it holds 74% to "significantly improve the value of the business."
8.4 Fixed income
Bankers warned that bond markets were “flashing red” after nearly a billion dollars left emerging market bond markets in the last week of April, reports BCS Global Markets.
“Bond fund flow indicators are flashing red – first weekly outflows in 2019 from bond GEM funds were reported last week. Overall, net $0.9bn left all EM bond funds last week ending the inflows spree that has brought more than $25bn of fresh investor money into the asset class since the beginning of the year. We continue to highlight the negative momentum for bonds, and believe more outflows are on their way in the coming weeks,” Vyacheslav Smolyaninov, chief strategist and deputy head of research at BSC Global Markets said in a note.
Fund trading company EPFR Global just released its weekly fund flows data through week ending April 24 that saw outflows from almost all emerging markets (EM) fund categories.
Russian assets saw c$15mn of net outflows from combined equity and bond fund flows in the reported week compared to c$60mn in the previous week. Russia-dedicated equity funds saw $20mn of outflows, down from $30mn the
86 RUSSIA Country Report May 2019 www.intellinews.com