Barclays Africa shares dip on talk of sale

Barclays Bank Plc is set to pull out of Zimbabwe as part of an Africa-wide exit to focus on its core British and American markets, the Financial Times has reported, citing sources familiar with the matter.

Analysts and bankers said the share price drop was mainly driven by investor expectations that any sale of such a large stake in Barclays Africa would be conducted at below market prices.

Barclays has had operations in parts of Africa for nearly a century.

The bank started off as the National Bank of South Africa in 1916 before becoming the Barclays Bank DCO (Dominion, Colonial and Overseas) and later Barclays Bank of Kenya. The decision was made by the Barclays board after the review stated that it makes strategic sense to exit the continent. With 325 years of history and expertise in banking, Barclays operates in over 50 countries and employs over 130,000 people.

“Barclays Bank of Kenya is not shutting down and there are no plans at local, regional or group level to shut down our operations here”, said BBK managing director Jeremy Awori. In 2013, Barclays merged its Africa operations with Absa.

“Barclays Africa is financially-independent, listed independently, and we are not closing our operations in Africa”.

 Barclays Africa has over 9.2 million customers in South Africa.

Barclays and Barclays Africa Group Limited will announce their 2015 financial results tomorrow. It manages about R1.5-trillion ($63 billion) in assets for the Government Employees Pension Fund. PIC told Business Day in January that if Barclays is selling, PIC is buying.

“Unless there is a really powerful player that has a deep balance sheet and can add strategic value to Barclays Africa it’s not in the interest of minority shareholders to see it passed on to somebody else”, he said.

Talk of a Barclays sell-down comes less than three years after Barclays increased its stake in Barclays Africa Group from 55 percent to to 62.3 percent. Any change in the shareholding of Barclays Africa would not impact the shareholding structure of those individual operations, the bank noted.

It has 12 million customers across 12 countries including South Africa, Kenya, Botswana, Ghana, Zambia, Mauritius, Mozambique, Seychelles, Uganda and Tanzania.

One of the largest commercial banks in the State of Qatar, Doha Bank, past year established a representative office in South Africa.