Russian equities rose last week despite the drop in the price of oil. The surge of optimism on global markets helped Russia to end the week in the black. This optimism was mainly due to improved investor sentiment surrounding the hope that Sino-US trade tensions could soon ease.
The consumer goods sector outperformed the market. This was mainly due to Yandex’s stock value rebounding, and gains for the stocks of retail chain companies, X5 and Magnit. The news that Yandex could change its governance structure appears to have reduced investor fears that the management could lose control over the company.
The power utilities sector lagged the other market sectors. Some utilities stocks contracted despite the overall positive trend in the market. There were no news to justify the weaker performance.
Russia advanced to 31st place in the World Bank’s ‘Doing Business’ rating. Last year it was in 35th place and seven years ago in 120th position. The largest improvement was in dealing with construction permits, for which Russia leapt from 115th to 48th. This was mainly due to two factors: the time period for passing through all the formal procedures related to construction shrank to 192-194 days from 230-260 days and the building quality control index rose to 14 from 10 (15 is the maximum value of this index). The Minister of Economic Development, Maxim Oreshkin, said that some of the 2017-2018 reforms were not taken into consideration as they were not fully completed by 1 May. With these reforms completed, Russia could rise to 18th, according to his estimates.
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VEON and Alrosa are due to publish their Q3 financial results. Rosstat is going to publish inflation figure for October.