ZAGREB (Croatia), September 17 (SeeNews) – The initial public offering (IPO) of telecom T-HT whose subscription started on Monday pushed down the Croatian share indices further but the relatively high turnover shows that some investors use the recent market fall to buy cheaper shares, traders said.
The turnover in shares and bonds in floor trading was 85.6 million kuna ($16.2 million/11.7 million euro), slightly down from 94.3 million kuna on Friday, but substantially higher than the summer volumes.
“The big turnovers indicate that part of investors who trade ‘against the market’ widely use the slide in prices to buy shares. Time will show if and in what period this strategy will work,” said a trader with Ilirika brokerage.
The 30-share Crobex index of the Zagreb Stock Exchange shed 1.47% to finish at 4,579.1 points falling for a sixth day in a row.
“Having underperformed the entire central and eastern Europe region, the local benchmark Crobex kept its head down amid further broad-based sell-off ahead of the Croatian telecom IPO,” said an analyst with Hypo Alpe-Adria-Bank. The IPO of the country’s top telecom is expected to drain around $6.0 billion kuna amid keen investor interest.
The 20-share Croemi index, calculated by commercial bank Raiffeisenbank Austria, declined 1.27% and finished at 3,782.99. Despite the recent market slide, both indices gained more than 40% since the beginning of the year.
The CROX capitalisation-weighted price index of the seven most traded stocks on the ZSE, which the Vienna Stock Exchange launched this summer, was 2,569.25 points, down 0.92% in euro terms.
In block trading, food manufacturer Podravka lost 0.58% to close at 517 kuna, having made the day's largest turnover of 10.1 million kuna. Oil and gas company INA, an index heavyweight, ranked second with 9.0 million kuna turnover. It ended 0.38% lower at 2,601 kuna. Most of the other blue chips also ended in the red as construction companies IGH and Dalekovod lost some 2.30% each on turnovers of some 3.0 million kuna each.
Share prices of port operators Luka Ploce and Luka Rijeka dropped by 7.22% and 6.08% respectively.
Overall, decliners outnumbered advancers by 83 to 22, while 34 maintained their price levels.
The fixed-income Crobis index ended 0.04% lower at 98.5185 points.
(1 euro =7.3233 Croatian kuna)