Africa News blog
African business, politics and lifestyle
Betting on Zimbabwe
With global risk aversion decreasing there has been renewed interest in frontier markets.
They don’t come much more frontier than Zimbabwe, which is where Investec Asset Management is looking to make one of its newest investments – buying into a supermarket chain – and then for other potential opportunities.
Despite the continued political troubles since President Robert Mugabe and old rival Morgan Tsvangirai put together a power sharing government just over a year ago, Zimbabwe’s economy grew last year for the first time after a decade of debilitating decline. Growth was estimated at nearly 5 percent.
Returns on the stock market have been even better, although trading remains thin. The ZSE Industrials Index is more than 160 percent above where it was a year ago if down 20 percent from its high last October).
