December 21 (SeeNews) - The indices of the Bucharest Stock Exchange (BVB) rose in soaring turnover on Friday, the last trading day of the year, and drug maker Antibiotice surged after Romania set the starting price for the sale of its majority stake in the company, brokers said.
The Bucharest Stock Exchange (BVB) blue-chip BET index rose most, closing up 2.94% at 9,825.38 points. The BET-C index rose 2.25% to 6,665.47. The BET-FI index that only tracks Romania's five investment finds, the SIFs, rose 1.55% to 78,669.68. The ROTX index of Romania's 11 most liquid stocks, a joint index of the BVB and the Vienna Stock Exchange, added 1.87% to 21,640.52.
"Trading volumes were huge [...]. There were clients on both sides – those who want to close positions and those who want to open positions. Most probably, investors think that next year will be a year of rises and they want to open long-term positions," one broker told SeeNews.
Antibiotice stock was the biggest price gainer on Friday, adding 14.53% to 2.05 lei ($0.8/0.6 euro). On Thursday, the government's asset-selling agency set a starting price of 2.0 lei per share, or 136 million euro ($195.4 million) in total, for the sale of its 53.0173% stake in Antibiotice through an open bid tender that will be held on March 18.
The allotment rights attached to the shares in the initial public offering (IPO) of Romanian gas transmission company Transgaz ended their third day of bourse trading at 355 lei, up 8.77% from Thursday’s closing, generating a turnover of 16.97 million lei. The rights made big gains on Wednesday, creating turnover of 47 million lei.
This is the first time that allotment rights have been traded in Romania. Such trading is meant to close the gap between subscription in an IPO and the start of trade. Up until now, investors have had to wait for weeks for regulatory approval to start trading in the shares they bought in an IPO. In the Transgaz IPO investors received one allotment right for each share they bought.The IPO of 10% of majority state-owned Transgaz was 28 times oversubscribed, with the total value of placed orders exceeding 6.3 billion lei.
BVB’s turnover moer than doubled, reaching 174.5 million lei from 77.6 million lei on Thursday. The overall traded share volume trebled to 166.9 million from 56.7 million on Thursday.
Oil and gas group Petrom was the most traded stock in regular trading, with a turnover of 23.2 million lei, although it lost 3.50% to close at 0.4970 lei per share. SIF 2 Moldova closed up 0.87% at 3.48 lei in in the second highest turnover of some 21 million lei, SIF 5 Oltenia ended up 1.17% at 4.34 lei in the third largest turnover of of 20.9 million lei.
Blue-chip BRD bank followed in terms of turnover, gaining 5.26% to 28 lei in 15.2 million lei turnover. The other blue-chip bank, Banca Transilvania, closed unchanged at 0.90 lei in turnover of 9.3 million lei.
Rasdaq-C, the composite index of the RASDAQ over-the-counter market, rose 2.61% to 4,628.55 points. Turnover on the RASDAQ market fell to 15.7 million lei from 21million lei on Thursday.
Trading on the BVB will resume on January 3, 2008.
(1 euro = 3.4974 Romanian lei)