Crédito: fuente
While Amazon.com Inc. and its FANG cohort have grabbed the headlines, some of the biggest stock-market winners in Europe during the coronavirus pandemic may be companies you’ve never heard of.
Investors seeking stellar returns have been snapping up shares of small companies that range from e-commerce merchants to mobile-game makers. Shares of German retailers Westwing Group AG and Home24 SE and Sweden’s Lyko Group AB and Boozt AB have more than doubled this year, outpacing Amazon’s gain of about 70%. Away from retail, LoopUp Group Plc, which makes software for video conference calls, and game maker G5 Entertainment AB also have soared, as Bloomberg reports.
“Small caps can be quite agile in an environment where things are changing quite quickly,” Hywel Franklin, head of European equities at Mirabaud Asset Management Ltd., said in an interview. “Thinking about what the new normal looks like, it’s clear that some of the companies which are best placed for that will also be in the small-cap area.”
In e-commerce, analysts at Sanford C. Bernstein Ltd. predict that online spending growth next year will return to pre-Covid levels. The real benefit of the one-time boost during the pandemic will be in giving companies three to four years’ worth of scale in a year, according to analyst Aneesha Sherman. Whether the shares’ outperformance will continue is another matter.
“Investors are questioning whether they should take profits at current levels,” Sherman said. “I think it depends heavily on the company — which stocks have signs of long-term quality in the underlying growth versus which are riding the wave of the tech rally.” Here’s a round-up of some European small-cap stocks with an online focus that have benefited from the pandemic, with year-to-date stock performance.