Wednesday, January 4, 2012

UniCredit, Triple Trouble

A bank holding company that had
Two acceptable banks and one bad,
Found itself, in duress,
On the whole, valued less
Than the sum of its pieces would add.

"Is it time for a breakup of UniCredit?" asks The Wall Street Journal's Heard on the Street column. UniCredit, an international bank based in Italy, has a third of its operations in Germany and Austria, and another third in the emerging markets of Central and Eastern Europe. Right now, though, it's the home country that investors focus on, where the bank has €40 billion exposure to Italian government bonds, equal to 90% of its equity. As a result, UniCredit trades "at a substantial discount to the sum of its parts." At this rate, writer Simon Nixon's tongue-in-cheek suggestion to rebrand the bank as "EineKredit" could only help.

2 comments:

  1. I agree with this view and say that there really some part in CEE whose value is zero or below zero!

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  2. I can add that the article mentions onlybond portfolio. I am sorry to say that Unicredit has not cleaned up yet the whole NPL portfolio (there are still undisclosed bad loans and losses to come out!!). At least other Eur 5bln if not more!

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