UAE / MENA Equities Analyst / Associate

Assist the Portfolio Manager in screening new investment opportunities in MENA. Help maintain active coverage and financial models on the names in our investment universe in the local equity portfolio. Active participation in maintaining live valuation tables across the coverage. Maintain active dialogue with all the relevant stakeholders (investee companies / sell-side community) and stay up to date with relevant fundamental / flow related data to augment decision making on the investible universe.

Duties and Responsibilities :

• Within the framework of approved guidelines for regional equity portfolios, maintaining research coverage on target companies’ universe in the UAE and Oman;
• A generalist analyst orientation across various sectors / industries, or at the minimum sector exposure of three or more sectors across: Banks, Real Estate, Telcos / Utilities, Consumer, Energy Industrial and Logistics / Transportation, among others.
• Creating Excel based financial models (with historical analysis & forecast) on both investee and prospect investable companies, with regular quarterly result updates & requisite analytical commentary, and ability to assess impact on forecasted financial outlook and valuation parameters.
• Conduct fundamental research on short-listed targets based on the best research practices covering management meetings, sell-side analyst calls / research, industry events & investor conferences or other proprietary intelligence sources, financial statement analysis and modelling, valuation, scenario analysis & stress test, comparative performance of listed competitors, etc.
• Maintaining live peer valuation tables across the investable universe of regional equities. Maintaining a live portfolio holdings valuation table with updated in-house forecast and valuation outlook.
• Regular scanning of existing and prospect coverage universe for new idea generation; in both primary and secondary markets.
• Daily monitoring of company specific / industry / macros news, corporate actions, through relevant information. Adept at assessing impacts of news-flow / corporate developments on coverage universe and making recommendations to the portfolio manager.
• Presenting investment / divestment proposals in respect of researched and selected stocks before the Investment Committee.
• Strong financial modelling skills, with strong and demonstrable analytical skills to decipher growth trends, margins, financial ratios, and valuation metrics. Ability to create company financial forecasts, with due emphasis on key revenue and margin drivers, ROE and balance sheet drivers. Perform sensitivity analysis.
• Ability to build and demonstrate a strong understanding of valuation models including but not limited to DCF, Gordon Growth, Residual Income, and relative valuation. With a strong understanding of assumption sensitivity to valuation approaches.

Qualifications

Education :

• Ideally CFA Charter holder or MBA
• Bachelor’s Degree in Business or applicable area of study

Experience :

• Some experience of listed equity fund managers’ selection, particularly in the MENA region.
• 5 to 10 years of equity research and analysis experience of which at least 5 years focusing on the UAE or GCC equity markets with minimum 3 years in the UAE market.
• Buy-side and sell-side analysts will be considered.

Additional Information

Skills & Abilities :

• English & Arabic is a must.
• Exposure to working with all modern equity research tools (Bloomberg / Eikon) and usual office-based technology (MS Office / among others)
• Focused and disciplined Personality
• Hard-working and pro-active with strong ethical and moral standards
• An avid regional micro / macro news reader, with a questioning mindset of and ability to visualize the impact of various micro / macro developments on existing and prospect investment universe.