Oslo Stock Exchange (Oslo OMX) - Norwegian stock market overview

Week 15 (10.04.2012 13.04.2012) Trading week 15 started only on Tuesday which is day later than usually. However, after a long period of holidays traders showed up a lot of interest in trading shares. From the graph below you can see that OSEAX index has experienced a serious increase in price during the first 3 days of the trading week, and then dramatically lost a number of points during the last day. Overall, OSEAX Oslo index fell by 1.95% from 476.58 (highest price) to 460.88 (lowest price) points in a week time. The total turnover during the week reached EUR 2,414,196,953.376984.

Figure 1: Development of Oslo Bors All-share Index. Retrieved from: http://www.oslobors.no/

The biggest winner this week was Schibsted (SCHo) with its 3.37% gain in stock price. Yara International (YARo) is at the second place this week with 0.70% gain in price per share. Although Seadrills (SDRLo) stock fell by 0.47% in price, it still became the third highest gain among the firms traded in Oslo OMX (lowest negative gain in that case). On the other hand, Marine Harvest (MHGo) had the most significant negative gain in stock price of 5.35%. This stock was very closely followed by Storebrand (STBo) which has experienced a decrease of its share value by 5.31%.

This week Marine Harvest has experienced the biggest loss (5.35%) in the stock price. This might have happened because of two different reasons. One of them is general tendency the stock price of shares is falling during this month. The other thing that may have caused this was the official announcement about open a new production line that the companys main competitor Nofima has made on Thursday. Nofima decided to expand their production by starting production of meal based on by-product from the king crab. This by-product was disposed of previously. Therefore Nofima can start producing new meals without changes in raw materials

used for that. This fact can be the reason why investors have switched their interest from Marine Harvest to Nofima.

Schibsted had the biggest increase this week with a rise in stock value of 3.37%. Even though the company has ended up with the best positive result in the stock exchange this week, the firms stock value has been experiencing fluctuations. The company has started this week with the stock value of 27.5 EUR/share. During Wednesday and Thursday it has significantly increased to 28.56 EUR/share and then eventually ended up with 28.44 EUR/share on Friday. One of the reasons why the companys stock value might have increased during the week was a disclosure of large shareholdings in the company, which has increased companys market value. There is a high possibility that this positive tendency will remain in the nearest future.

Figure2: Price development of Schibsted in week 15. Source: oslobors.no

Yara International became the second biggest winner this week with an increase in stock value 0.70%. This week was an active one for the company,

as it was experiencing a huge increase in stock value starting from Tuesday. Yara International began the week with 34.92 EUR as a price per share and ended up with 36.15 EUR/share. The most important reason why this increase in investors interest took place was the issuing of Financial Report 2011 of Yara International, together with the separate Impact Reporting 2011. This reports showed that the company had generated the largest profits in 2011 as compare to several previous years, which made traders believe it is going to continue making that high profits in the future, too.

Chart 3 Price development of Yara International in week 15. Source: oslobors.no

To conclude, this week was unsuccessful for almost all firms traded in Oslo Bors during the iGame. It has been caused mostly by bad financial news from European neighbors of Norway (such as the predictions made lately about the further fall in the GDP in Spain and future worsening public debt). There are also economic problems inside Norway itself. Numerous industries are hit by sagging European markets and high costs. They were also hit by the strong Norwegian krone. However, Norwegians are quite conservative; therefore we expect that in some time they will start investing more, by this increasing OSEAX index and improving overall situation in the stock exchange. Review by: Margarita Cernova, Yauheni Hanchyts, Viktorija Juskevica.