Russian stocks fall on coronavirus news, US GDP underperformance

MOSCOW, Jul 30 (PRIME) -- The Russian stock market contracted on Friday on the news about spreading of the new types of coronavirus, and modest the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) growth in April–June, analysts said.

The MOEX Russia Index fell 0.86% to 3,771.58 and the RTS decreased 0.83% to 1,625.76.

“The ‘Friday’ effect hit the Russian market. After a couple of days of good growth, concerns emerged again on the global market. Commodity contracts fell in the first half of the day, while the U.S. dollar tried to grow,” Andrei Kochetkov, leading analyst for global research at Otkritie Broker, said.

The European market contracted, and judging by some sectors investors feared a further slowdown of the Chinese economy and statistics on an uptick of new coronavirus cases in Asia, including China and Japan. The oil prices rebounded in the second half of the day, but the spread of new types of the coronavirus will not allow demand to recover actively, and the factor did not help the Russian market, Kochetkov said.

“The MOEX Russia Index fell … due to the negative dynamics of the U.S. trading floors caused by the news that the U.S. GDP grew only by 6.5% in the second quarter, while the market expected an increase of 8.4%,” Alexander Osin, Freedom Finance’s analyst, said.

Shares of Russia’s second largest bank VTB outperformed the market and grew 0.70% to 0.0487 rubles on the news that the net profit for the second quarter outperformed market expectations by 13%, Osin said.

Oil and gas pipe producer TMK jumped by 37.18% to 99.70 rubles on the news about a recommendation of the board of directors to pay 17.71 rubles per share, or a total of 18.296 billion rubles, in dividends for January–June. Vice President Vladimir Shmatovich said in June that the company expected no quarterly dividend payments any time soon due to the acquisition of Chelyabinsk Pipe Plant in March.

Below are the MOEX Russia Index’ five most active stocks on Friday:

Company	Change, %	Last price, rbl	Trading volume, bln rbl
Sberbank	+1.05	306.31	14.490
Gazprom	-0.78	284.76	11.615
Lukoil	-2.10	6281.00	6.868
Norilsk Nickel	+0.41	25280.00	6.070
Severstal	-0.43	1787.60	4.429

(73.1904 rubles – U.S. $1)

End