South Africa: Kokkie Kooiman: Coronation Asset Management

23 November 2001

During the third quarter of this year institutional investors offloaded something like 90m Investec shares. Coronation sold virtually all of its shares in the banking group, about 40m of them, and we're joined now by the man whose research would have helped fund managers at Coronation make that decision. Kokkie Kooiman. Kokkie thanks for joining us. Before we get onto hearing your views on Investec's London listing, Kokkie, what made you sell Investec so aggressively during the third quarter?

KOKKIE KOOIMAN: I must give credit there to Neville Chester, our analyst who does all the nitty gritty ... on 30 June, specifically in our financial services fund, we were still 10% in Investec, and at that stage the market was looking at 24% earnings per share growth of Investec, and the more Neville did his work, the more he could see that they had such a good year last year, specifically in the UK operations, they were going to battle, with the markets being very down, to make somewhere between 10% and 15% for the year. So you knew the market was looking for higher earnings and as the market would see that they're not going to make 24%, it would sell it off. So we were just trying to be ahead of the market - which we were. Having said that, I sold down by [indistinct] to about 3%, and I must say I was very reluctant. I mean, I've known Steven and Bernard and the guys at Investec for many years, and you don't get a better management team than those guys. But since the share hit R155 I've started buying back every time it got below R155. So I've increased my weighting by more than 50% because the market then always overreacts - I think it hit R142 at one stage, and that was just totally overdone.

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