EFG Hermes, the leading financial services corporation in Frontier Emerging Markets (FEM), kicked off its 3rd Virtual Investor Conference today. Running through to 9 March 2021 on a digital platform moderated by EFG Hermes, the conference is headlined as "FEMs Regaining Momentum" and brings together executives from 197 companies representing 28 countries with more than 700 investors from 253global institutions to exchange insights on the current state of FEMs and strategies for recovery.
Karim Awad, Group Chief Executive Officer of EFG Hermes Holding said, "With 2020 now behind us, industry leaders are expecting emerging markets to be prime beneficiaries of the economic restart already underway, and investors are giving frontier market assets even larger allocations of their portfolios.
Our third Virtual Investor Conference opens its doors today to one of the most diverse – and largest ever – group of participants, and we hope that the thousands of direct meetings taking place will provide participantswith firsthand insights intowhat a recovery is going to look like for these markets and how sustainable that recovery is going to be as we help them unlock new value across their portfolios." "A weaker dollar coupled with heightened equity valuations in other parts of the world has increased appetite for FEM stocks, said said Mohamed Ebeid, co-CEO of the Investment Bank at EFG Hermes. He continued that "At the same time, the expected easing of trade conflicts and resultant FDI inflows back into these markets will drive currency values up and interest rates down. This bullish view on FEMs is only magnified by the rollout of vaccination programs that are already increasing risk appetite and reversing more than $90 billion in outflows from EM equities at the outset of COVID-19 lockdowns last March." He also said that "the questions then become, ‘How quickly will we be seeing these positive impacts and how long will they last?' — questions we anticipate will be top of mind with investors during the conference and those we hope the platform can provide insights to, as we work to drive investments back into these economies,"
EFG Hermes has organized flagship investor conferences throughout its core MENA expertise and more recently in the FEM space. In June 2020, it hosted the first Virtual Investor Conference of its kind to global acclaim, having had to shift to a virtual model in light of circumstances due to the onset of the COVID-19 crisis.
The 2nd Virtual Investor Conference facilitated more than 11,000 meetings between international investors and senior management from 157 companies across 25 countries, with 650 institutional investors representing 240 financial institutions.
