$12.6bn
Few tech investors have done as well recently as Steve Ballmer, the former Microsoft chief executive who when he stepped aside in 2014 was the software company’s biggest individual shareholder with a stake worth $12.6bn. Since then, under successor Satya Nadella, the Microsoft stock price has gone up 80 per cent. “As a shareholder, no one can complain about the share price — it really is unbelievable to me,” says Mr Ballmer.
Mr Ballmer, however, has expresses reservations in at least one department: “Profit has been relatively flat and I hope to see that grow.” The latest financial results from four tech concerns with a combined stock market value of $1.75tn, released on Thursday, suggest that there is hope for profit-conscious investors such as Mr Ballmer.
$4bn
Nigeria is not the only playground for the new Chinese appetite for infrastructure investment in Africa. A few miles outside the Kenyan town of Makindu on the Nairobi-Mombasa road sits a heavily guarded compound. Only the sign outside, in red Chinese lettering, indicates that this is the project site for “section 9” of a new $4bn Chinese-built railway that will run 300 miles between the Kenyan capital and the Indian Ocean port. The railway is the centrepiece of an infrastructure splurge by President Uhuru Kenyatta, who faces re-election this year and whose Kenyan government has invested heavily in roads, pipelines, oil development and geothermal power. It is also one of China’s most important investments in east Africa and follows the opening in January of a $4.2bn, 470-mile line from Djibouti to Addis Ababa, the capital of landlocked Ethiopia.
$485m
The initial offering of Kenya’s world-leading infrastructure bond that can only be bought by mobile phone and for as little as $29 has sold out two days ahead of schedule. Finance ministry officials said more than 5,000 people had participated in the $1.50m M-Akiba pilot project sale while another 97,000 had registered an interest in the product. It has a three-year tenure, pays an annual interest rate of 10 per cent and the proceeds will be used to fund infrastructure project. The main offering for $485m is to be launched by President Uhuru Kenyatta in June.
$2.99bn
Africa’s trade deficit with the rest of the world has fallen to its lowest level for nearly three years, partly off the back of a firming of commodity prices that has improved the continent’s terms of trade. The pan-African trade deficit narrowed to a monthly average of $2.99bn in the three months to January, according to figures collated by UBS, based on data from the IMF.
However the recovery also has a darker side, being in part driven by economic weakness that has slashed demand for imports across much of the continent. “We have seen an import shock from low growth due to low commodity prices,” said Peter Attard Montalto, emerging market economist at Nomura. “Growth has been so weak in Angola, South Africa and Nigeria that import demand has been quite low in recent years, particularly in Nigeria where the FX policies discourage imports in many ways,” said John Ashbourne, Africa economist at Capital Economics, a London-based consultancy referring to Nigeria’s ban on the use of foreign currency to import 41 categories of goods, totalling 700-800 items.
Cash cow
They don’t call it a cash cow for nothing. In Zimbabwe, new legislation would make it easier for small- and medium-scale farmers to use “moveable assets”, such as cows, goats and sheep, as well as farm machinery, vehicles and accounts receivable, as collateral for loans. Under the law, introduced by President Robert Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF party, financial institutions would be obliged to accept such items as security for credit.
