OREANDA-NEWS. Renaissance Capital, a leading emerging and frontier markets investment bank, announces that the Firm doubled its net profit from core business for the full year 2014, bringing it to \$40.5mn from \$19.2mn in 2013.

In 2014, the Firm saw strong revenues from core business and continued to reduce its cost base, which demonstrated a 17.5% decrease. Total operating expenses fell to \$197.1mn in 2014, from \$238.8mn in 2013. Total operating income reached \$250mn. Renaissance Capital’s balance sheet remains strong with its equity-to-assets ratio at 14.2%, compared with 13.5% at the end of 2013. Total assets and equity stand at \$3.31bn and \$468.6mn, respectively.

In 2014, Renaissance Capital remained strongly committed to its core regions of Sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, Russia/the CIS, and Turkey, as it further focused on growing its market-leading frontier and emerging markets offering. The Firm opened an office in Dubai, UAE, and launched trading in the Middle East markets, including UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Morocco, Oman and Tunisia.

Commenting on the results, Igor Vayn, Renaissance Capital CEO, said: “Amidst the challenging market conditions in 2014, Renaissance Capital not only maintained its leading position across the product offering and regions of focus but also exceeded the expectations of profit, doubling it year-on-year. As global institutional investors are shifting their focus to frontier markets, we believe these represent the catalyst for the Firm’s franchise growth. The combination of our world-class team and on-the-ground capabilities in the world’s most exciting markets are a winning formula for our goal of providing investors with best-in-class research, trading, banking and access to capital.”

In the past year Renaissance Capital acted as advisor on a range of most complicated and important transactions in emerging and frontier markets, including the Do & CO placement on the Istanbul Stock Exchange, the IPO of Nigeria’s SEPLAT via a dual listing on the London and Nigeria Stock Exchanges, the IPO of Georgia’s TBC Bank, sale of Orkla Brands Russia, as well as the IPO of Rhodes Food Group on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and the IPO of Nairobi Securities Exchange, among others.