At the end of March 2013, Petrobras, Brazil’s state-run oil company, had a market value of $113 billion. That is down to $74 billion Tuesday. Said another way, Petrobras is barely worth more than $70 billion in shares it sold in 2010 in what is still the largest stock offering on record.
The seemingly never-ending slide in shares of Petrobras has hampered the iShares MSCI Brazil Capped ETF (NYSEArca: EWZ). So has Itau Unibanco’s (NYSE: ITUB). The PwC list shows the Brazilian bank had a market value of $82 billion in March 2013 and $54 billion in March 2008. Today, that number is just over $33 billion. Itau and Petrobras combine for about 18% of EWZ’s weight, according to iShares data.
Since November 2007, Russian energy giant Gazprom “shrunk to less than $100 billion, while PetroChina lost almost 80 percent of its market value,” Bloomberg reported. Gazprom is the largest holding in the Market Vectors Russia ETF (NYSEArca: RSX), accounting for 8.6% of the largest Russia ETF’s weight.
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