(BFM Bourse) – With defense stocks, sought after with a view to European rearmament, commodity producers constitute a haven of safety for investors, particularly in energy and metals.
That’s it: the Paris Stock Exchange officially returns to “bear market” on Monday, an Anglo-Saxon term designating a bear market, down at least 20% from its previous peak. Close to 7,400 points on January 4, a historic high, the CAC 40 finds itself two months later at 5,856 points after an hour of trading on Monday, a further drop of 3.39% since Friday when the sanction had already been imposed. particularly vivid.
Initially, it was companies with a significant presence in Russia, such as Renault (owner of Lada, the leader in the Russian automobile market) or Société Générale (which does not rule out being expropriated from its subsidiary Rosbank ) which have been the most strongly sanctioned. But investors now fear that sanctions imposed on Russia, which could hamper its energy exports, will have painful fallout for the European economy and most sectors are suffering.
Among the rare exceptions are logically the producers of energy and industrial raw materials, which see the value of their production soar.
An 83% subsidiary of the American group ExxonMobil, the oil refining specialist Esso SAF has thus posted an increase of more than 80% in its share price since the start of 2022, crossing the level of 26 euros for the first time since September 2019.
The junior oil company Maurel & Prom, also majority-owned by a foreign group (Indonesian Pertamina in this case) grew by 63%, while the company’s asset portfolio is solely focused on Africa and America Latin, therefore immune to any sanction aimed at Russia.
Unlike TotalEnergies. The position of the tricolor giant of the sector seems more and more difficult to hold: even if it is not required at this stage, BP, Shell, Equinor or ExxonMobil have purely and simply decided to leave the country after the invasion of the ‘Ukraine. TotalEnergies is currently limiting itself to indicating that it will respect the European sanctions, which do not currently target the energy sector. But the operators fear that the group exposed in particular to the natural gas sector, directly and via a stake in the capital of Novatek, will also be forced to give up on its Russian assets, faced with an aggravation of the conflict or an impossibility of maintaining financial ties. In this context, the TotalEnergies share has failed to take advantage of the rise in crude oil, posting stable or even slightly down since the start of the year. Its subsidiary Total Gabon, on the other hand, wins 32%.
Oil services companies such as Schlumberger (whose operations are North American and European, the legal headquarters in the Netherlands Antilles, and which has a secondary listing on Euronext Paris) and Vallourec are also highly sought after, gaining 31% and 19% respectively at this stage of 2022 in the perspective of a forced march revival of exploration and production budgets.
The metals producer Eramet saw its price appreciate by 67% at the same time, the group having notably obtained from the Caledonian government the authorization to increase by 50% its exports of nickel from their joint subsidiary SLN. Via Norilsk, Russia is today one of the world’s largest producers of this metal.
Producer of non-ferrous metals such as lead and zinc, not through mining but through recycling, Recylex is growing by 84%.
Gold fully playing its role as a safe haven with a price that reached a record in euros (1800 euros per ounce) and approached it in dollars (recovering the bar of 2000 dollars per ounce for the first time since the summer 2020), the Euro Resources company gains 14%. Without its own activity, this company collects a royalty on the production of the Rosebel gold mine in Suriname, the balance of the royalty contract still representing around 1.5 million ounces of gold.
Guillaume Bayre – ©2022 BFM Bourse
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