Investment decisions also pay off at annual awards

Korea Investment & Securities has the largest number of analysts who accurately predicted share prices of Korean companies, according to the third annual analyst awards sponsored by Thomson Reuters and the JoongAng Ilbo.

Three Korea Investment & Securities analysts received awards. Daewoo Securities, last year’s co-winner of the award with KTB Securities, had no winners this year. Big Korean securities firms struggled this year while relatively small, foreign securities firms cleaned up in this year’s awards.

The top three stock pickers were Justin Kim at UBS, whose primary coverage is financial services; Oliver Matthew, who covers wholesale and retail as well as food and personal products at CLSA; and Morgan Stanley’s Sara Lee, who covers financial services.

이준재 한국투자증권 리서치센터장

There were 43 award winners from 30 brokerages. Out of the winners, 16 analysts at 11 foreign investment securities firms, or a third of the total, won honors.

Four analysts snapped up awards for three consecutive years: Bae Ki-dal, a health care analyst at Shinhan Investment; Mok Young-chung, commercial bank analyst at RBS Asia; Lee Bong-jin machinery analyst at KTB Securities; and Seo Jung-yeon, wholesale and retail analyst at Shinyoung Securities.

The number of awards shrank compared to the previous year because Thomson Reuters and the JoongAng Ilbo excluded analysts that covered fewer than five industries and they didn’t rate top-earnings forecasters as they had for the last two years.

The JoongAng Ilbo and Thomson Reuters conducted evaluations of 952 analysts at 71 local and foreign brokerages that released reports about Korean companies.

StarMine, a subsidiary of Thomson Reuters, measured the performances of analysts based on the results of their buy and sell recommendations.

“In order to maintain the high quality of our awards and to ensure fairness in the calculation of our winners, we have decided not to include either of the earnings accuracy categories in the 2012 analyst awards,” said Mary Morgan, Global Head of Awards for Excellence for Thomson Reuters. “This decision stems from timing changes from when brokerage firms switched from the KGAAP to the IFRS accounting system. Because brokers made this change at different times throughout the year, we are unable to fairly compare performance on estimates across all analysts. We look forward to the return of earnings accuracy awards in 2013.”

A total of 14 industries were evaluated, including automobile, chemical and refineries, commercial banks, construction, consumer services, financial services, food and personal products, health care, industrial conglomerates, machinery, materials, technology hardware, telecommunication services and wholesale and retail.
The awards ceremony will take place at 11 a.m. on July 3 at the Westin Chosun Hotel, central Seoul.

By Kim Mi-ju [mijukim@joongang.co.kr]