Renaissance Capital, a leading emerging and frontier markets investment bank, has announced that the firm doubled its net profit from core business for the full-year 2014, bringing it to $40.5 million from $19.2 million in 2013.
In 2014, the firm saw strong revenues from core business and continued to reduce its cost base, which demonstrated a 17.5 percent decrease. Total operating expenses fell to $197.1 million in 2014, from $238.8 million in 2013.
Total operating income reached $250 million. Renaissance Capital’s balance sheet remains strong with its equity-to-assets ratio at 14.2 percent, compared with 13.5 percent at the end of 2013. Total assets and equity stand at $3.31 billion and $468.6 million, respectively.
In 2014, Renaissance Capital remained strongly committed to its core regions of sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, Russia/the CIS, and Turkey, as it further focused on growing its market-leading frontier and emerging markets offering.
The firm opened an office in Dubai, UAE, and launched trading in the Middle East markets, including UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Morocco, Oman and Tunisia.
Commenting on the results, Igor Vayn, Renaissance Capital CEO, said: “Amidst the challenging market conditions in 2014, Renaissance Capital not only maintained its leading position across the product offering and regions of focus but also exceeded the expectations of profit, doubling its year-on-year. As global institutional investors are shifting their focus to frontier markets, we believe these represent the catalyst for the Firm’s franchise growth. The combination of our world-class team and on-the-ground capabilities in the world’s most exciting markets are a winning formula for our goal of providing investors with best-in-class research, trading, banking and access to capital.”
In the past year, Renaissance Capital acted as advisor on a range of most complicated and important transactions in emerging and frontier markets, including the Do & CO placement on the Istanbul Stock Exchange, the IPO of Nigeria’s Seplat via a dual listing on the London and Nigerian stock exchanges, the IPO of Georgia’s TBC Bank, sale of Orkla Brands Russia as well as the IPO of Rhodes Food Group on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and the IPO of Nairobi Securities Exchange, among others.
