Mar 4, 2024
BofA Scraps Disputed Erdemir Call, Cites Error in Assumption
, Bloomberg News
(Bloomberg) -- BofA Securities amended a report on Erdemir after the Turkish steelmaker disputed an earlier analysis that implied a potential decline of over 60% in its market price.
“This report replaces a prior report issued on Feb. 29, correcting an error in assumed realized steel price, which meant estimated Ebitda and derived price objective were not calculated correctly,” BofA Securities analysts including Jason Fairclough wrote in a note on Monday.
BofA upgraded Erdemir to neutral from underperform, while raising its price target to 47 liras from 19.
In the earlier note, BofA analysts cut the steelmaker’s price target to 17 liras and maintained an underperform recommendation. Erdemir challenged the report, with CFO Serdar Basoglu telling Bloomberg that BofA acted on “a faulty model based on wrong assumptions.”
Erdemir rose as much as 2.2% to 46.94 liras on Monday, extending this year’s gain to about 14%.
“After a challenging 2023, we see the business as having mostly normalized,” BofA said in its new report. “That said, even as we see a path to deleveraging, we do see uncertainties and risks related to both local policies and global oversupply risks for steel.”
“It was appropriate for BofA to take our concerns seriously, evaluate them and correct the model in the report,” Suleyman Savas Erdem, CEO of Erdemir parent Oyak, told Bloomberg in an email. “The mechanism based on the mutual trust between the company and investors worked and the mistake was eliminated.”
(Updates with comment from Oyak in final paragraph.)
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.