Small profits for SIFs

While expecting dividends to be distributed by the firms in which they hold stakes, four of the five financial investment companies (SIF) posted modest profits four months through the year. The investors on the Stock Exchange are in their turn waiting to see how much the SIFs will make from dividends and the SIF quotes have been extremely stable over the last few weeks. The only SIF to have posted a healthy profit for the first four months is SIF Muntenia (118bn ROL). Most of the profit was due to the sale of the approximately 5% in Romanian cement producer Romcim to Lafarge during the mandatory takeover bid. SIF Muntenia therefore attained one third of the full-year estimates in its 2003 S&R budget in four months, while the other SIFs attained 5% to 15% of their targets. SIFs’ net assets went up by 2.9% last month. The top performer in this regard was SIF Transilvania, whose NAV last month crossed the 11,000 ROL threshold for the first time, reaching 11,139 ROL, 12% higher than early this year. ZF