It seems that CEE equity markets were able to diverge from the development of the Western European markets and significantly outperformed them since the beginning of October. Also in YTD performance the Czech and Hungarian markets are among the best performers in Europe (despite the high share of telecom stocks, the worst performers YTD, in their indices).
Trading volumes in the region increased, as there is anecdotal evidence of return of foreign investors on the buy side. The reason could be the shift from underweight to neutral / slightly overweight regional position in their funds after several main broker houses increased their recommendation for CEE equity markets allocation.
Investors started to look at local investment stories, such as expected significant decrease of interest rates in Hungary and Poland, successful restructuring of Czech banks, not as much geared balance sheets of CEE telecoms, expected positive earnings growth in 2001 and 2002 (the IBES consensus … 16% EPS growth for 2001 and 21% growth for 2002 for our universe of 40 stocks) and especially not demanding valuations in respect to the expected earnings growth (again IBES consensus … PE01 11.6 and PE02 9.6).
Despite my expectations are below consensus for this year (8% EPS growth and PE01 12.4) I expect that the increase of the relative valuation levels for all CEE equity markets will continue to be the main theme for some time as a result of the allocation shift before investors will start to focus on particular stock stories.
(Jan Hájek)