BELGRADE (Serbia), October 2 (SeeNews) – Shares on the Belgrade Stock Exchange (BELEX) edged down in dull trading on Tuesday, brokers said.
The blue-chip BELEX15 index slipped just 0.01% to 2,820.42 points, while the broader BELEXline lost 0.26% to 4,430.04. However, the joint SRX index of the bourses in Belgrade and Vienna went up 0.16% to 1,588.36.
“Today there wasn’t anything that could be singled out. Yesterday there was,” Uros Spasenovic, a broker with Belgrade Independent brokerage, told SeeNews. “It was the huge block trading in AIK Banka, a transaction of more than 48 million euro.”
The Serbian unit of the National Bank of Greece (NBG), Vojvodjanska Banka, sold its whole stake of nearly five percent in blue chip AIK Banka to its parent company, NBG, the Central Register of Serbia's Central Securities and Clearing House showed on Tuesday. On Monday in a block deal, 350,000 ordinary shares in AIK Banka were traded for a total of 3.850 billion dinars ($69.7 million/49.1 million euro) and 50,000 of its preferential shares changed hands for 277.5 million dinars.
“So regardless of the fact that it was such a huge amount of trading, the shares practically remained in the same group,” Spasenovic said. “And this huge trading had no influence on today’s price movement in [AIK Banka].”
AIK Banka shares dropped 0.99% to 11,188 dinars in over 64 million dinars of turnover on Tuesday, the highest of the day.
In block trading, engineering company Montinvest traded over 7,000 shares at 27,000 dinars each in some 203 million dinars of turnover. “Montinvest is a very active engineering company. It operates in Russia, Libya, and so on, a firm with quite good prospects,” Spasenovic said.
“We still do not know who the buyer is but these are probably investment funds,” he added. “The price is high enough now but it could have a further mild rise as construction companies are among the ones with the best prospects currently on the market, while the banks stagnate.”
Total turnover on Tuesday was 770 million dinars, well down on Monday's 4.454 billion dinars, which was inflated by the AIK Banka block deal.
(1 euro = 78.44 dinars)