The Ipopema group is management-owned and is not backed by a finance-banking group. It was the second most active broker on the Warsaw Bourse last year, handling about EUR11.9 billion worth of transactions, which translated into an almost 10% market share. Ipopema beat big names like Credit Suisse Securities, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, ING, UBS and JPMorgan, which have offices in Poland and are very active on the Warsaw Bourse.
The Polish firm’s arrival in Romania shows the Bucharest Stock Exchange is starting to become interesting to major international companies, which expect to see it develop as the Polish stock market has in the past decade. The appointment of Ludwik Sobolewski, the former chairman of the Warsaw Bourse while it was rising, to the helm of the Bucharest Stock Exchange boosted visibility of the local market abroad and that showed in how foreign investment banks are looking at Romania now.
The privatizations announced by the government of Hidroelectrica, Electrica, Complexul Energetic Oltenia, harbor authorities and the Otopeni Airport and maybe even Romtelecom, set to be done by initial public offerings, could turn the Bucharest Stock Exchange into the new hot spot of the region. This is why heavyweights that would ignore Romania not so long ago are now vying to win contracts in Bucharest.
The arrival of Ipopema shows things have radically changed since the end of 2012, when UniCredit and ING, two of the largest international financial groups operating in the region, closed their brokerage firms in Bucharest for lack of business.
Ipopema group manages 95 investment funds with 18 billion zlotys worth of assets (about EUR4.3 billion) and is one of the biggest fund managers in Poland.
Ipopema has also been involved in the most important transactions on the Warsaw Bourse, the initial public offerings of state-owned Energa and PKP Cargo, the sale of the government stake in the largest Polish bank PKO BP and the listing of Alior Bank, one of the largest private independent banks in the country.
Ipopema also operates on the Budapest Bourse where its market share is 6%.
Ipopema will not open a subsidiary in Bucharest, but operate under the EU passport as Czech Republic’s Wood has done so far. Polish financial supervisory authority is to notify its Romanian counterpart, ASF, this week.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)