Ahmad Shams El Din
Managing Director - Head of Research
Ahmed Shams El Din is an Egyptian finance professional, finance
professor, writer and speaker. Currently, Ahmad is a Managing Director, Global
Head of Research and a member of the IB Management Committee at EFG Hermes. He
is also an adjunct professor at the American University in Cairo’s (AUC)
Faculty of Management, where he teaches finance and investments to undergraduates
and to MBA and Master of Corporate Finance (MCF) students, including courses such
as Value Creation and Corporate Valuation. In addition to his personal blog, Ahmad
writes frequently on financial markets, politics and economic development
affairs in local and regional newspapers and speaks regularly in regional
economic conferences.
As an analyst, he led EFG Hermes’s research in different
sectors (oil and gas, petrochemicals, fertilisers, building materials and
construction), where he assessed and valued some of the largest listed
companies in the MENA region (Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha and Amman)
and international markets (Euronext, LSE). He is a top-ranked analyst by
international investors in global surveys: Euromoney Middle East Best Research
Management (where he won several first-place rankings), Thomson Reuters Extel
Survey and Institutional Investors (II) Magazine, in which he won the third
place in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa (EMEA) in 2015.
Ahmad heads a team of highly-qualified emerging market analysts in
Cairo, Dubai, Riyadh, Muscat, Karachi, Nairobi, London and Singapore, and
expanded the group’s research coverage beyond the MENA region for the first
time to include new emerging and frontier markets in Asia and Africa. He has led
the team to become one of the best 10 research houses in EMEA and by far the
best in the MENA region, according to the reputable Institutional Investors’ surveys
and several polls in 2015 and 2016.
Ahmad is a Global Executive MBA holder from INSEAD.
Elena Sanchez-Cabezudo, CFA
Managing Director - Head of Financials
Elena Sanchez-Cabezudo serves as Head of Financials Equity
Research at EFG Hermes and covers banks across different countries in the MENA
region. She has 15 years of sell-side financial research experience, combining
coverage of European and MENA financials. Prior to EFG Hermes, Elena was a
banking analyst at HSBC, London, with a particular focus on Southern European
banks. Previously, she worked as an analyst with the European Insurance Equity
Research teams at HSBC and Societe Generale in London.
Elena holds dual degrees in Law and Business Administration from
ICADE (Madrid) and has been a CFA Charterholder since 2003.
Hatem Alaa, CFA
Managing Director - Head of Consumer and Healthcare
Hatem Alaa is the Head of our Consumer and Healthcare team. Together
with Nada Amin, Vice President – Consumer and Healthcare, they cover a diverse
range of consumer-related (discretionary, retail and staples) and healthcare
stocks in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Kuwait. Hatem ranked among
the top 10 analysts in the MENA on the 2016-17 and 18 Extel survey, and the
team’s consumer team was runner-up in the Institutional Investor EMEA research
survey for three consecutive years (2015-17).
Hatem joined EFG Hermes in 2011 and has worked on four IPOs (Egyptian snack
company Edita in 2015, Egyptian white cheese producer Domty in 2016, UAE fuel
retailer ADNOC Distribution in 2017 and Egyptian garment exporter Dice in 2017)
during that time. Prior to joining EFG Hermes, Hatem was a sell-side analyst at
HC Securities and Investment for five years, where he led a team that covered a
number of diversified sectors in the MENA region, including consumer,
logistics, transportation, steel and oil and gas.
Hatem is a CFA Charterholder and holds a BA in Business
Administration from the American University in Cairo (AUC).
Kato Mukuru
Managing Director - Head of Frontier Markets
Research
Kato Arnold Mukuru joined EFG Hermes in mid-2017 as Head of
Frontier Research to lead the expansion of our research offering across core frontier
markets in Sub-Saharan African and Asia.
Kato has 19 years of experience in investment banking in New York, London,
Madrid, Lagos and Dubai, the first four years of which were in corporate
finance and the last 15 in research, where he covered European, South Asian,
African and Middle Eastern banks and insurance stocks. Research teams managed
by Kato have been ranked 1st in Sub-Saharan Africa and among the top three
across the frontier universe.
Kato holds a BA, summa cum laude, in Business Administration from
Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia (USA).
Murad Ansari
Managing Director - Financials – Pakistan/Sri
Lanka
Murad Ansari joined EFG Hermes in 2007 as part of the MENA
financials team. His specific coverage responsibilities include banks in
Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Murad holds an MBA from Karachi’s Institute of Business
Administration and has over 15 years of experience in equity research and sales
marketing. Before joining EFG Hermes, Murad headed the research and
institutional sales effort of one of the largest investment banks in
Pakistan.
Simon Kitchen
Managing Director - Head of Global
Strategy
Simon Kitchen leads our Macro-Strategy team — the top-ranked MENA
Strategy team in the Institutional Investor 2015 survey — which includes
strategy, economics and index-related research in MENA. In addition, Simon is
in charge of our MENA Top 20 portfolio, which has outperformed the market since
inception.
Simon has worked in Middle East financial markets for 16 years, joining the
firm in 2007 to initially cover economies in North Africa and the Levant.
Before EFG Hermes, he worked for political risk consultancy Eurasia Group in
New York and Cairo, leading the firm’s coverage of Egypt, Iran and Israel.