SPB Exchange (SPBE): a review by the numbers

Any multiples-based review of SPBE runs into one peculiarity: this is not an industrial company, nor even a bank, but market infrastructure whose revenue depends on turnover, and it was external events, not management decisions, that rewrote that turnover. That is why reading the SPBE card from top to bottom, as you would for a miner or a consumer stock, makes no sense here. The useful order is the reverse: first understand what today's fee and interest income is made of, and only then look at 42,55 and the other ratios as a consequence of it.

What actually stands behind the ticker

SPBE is the stock of the trading venue operator, not of the securities traded on it. The company earns money not from the market rising as such, but from transactions passing through its system: fees on turnover, income from its depository and settlement operations, and interest income from placing its own and its clients' funds. This is how any exchange works, and it is described separately in the piece on what an exchange does and does not do. What sets SPB Exchange apart from its neighbour on the market is its historical specialisation in foreign securities; exactly how the two business models diverged is covered in a comparison of the two Russian venues.

Why the standard multiples framework stumbles here

The usual toolkit for a review — leverage, EV/EBITDA, margins — loses its meaning for exchange infrastructure, or changes it. Net debt at a trading venue operator cannot be read the way it is read at a company with factories: the balance sheet holds both the company's own funds and funds that serve settlements, and mechanically subtracting "cash" from market capitalisation produces a number with no economic substance behind it. EBITDA is a weak guide too: depreciation at such a company is small, which means the indicator almost coincides with operating profit and adds nothing.

What remains are the ratios built on earnings and on capital. SPBE's earnings after 2022 took shape very differently from before: the share of interest income in them grew, while the share of fees from foreign securities shrank. Hence the main trap in the 42,55 figure: it is calculated on transition-period earnings, and a low or high value on its own says nothing about whether the stock is cheap or expensive. What matters is how much of the profit is recurring.

What to read in the financial statements

The company's reports are available in the reports section, and they are worth working through in the following order.

First, the income structure: fees versus interest. Interest income is sensitive to the level of interest rates in the economy and to the volume of funds held in accounts, which means it can rise while turnover falls — and that is not a sign that the core business is recovering.

Second, turnover and the number of active accounts, if the company discloses them. For an exchange this is revenue "in kind": fees are a derivative of turnover, and an earnings forecast without a turnover forecast is an empty exercise.

Third, operating expenses and how rigid they are. Infrastructure carries IT, staff and settlement-system maintenance costs almost regardless of how many trades went through. When turnover shrinks, this turns operating leverage from a friend into an adversary.

Dividends and taxes

For a company in the middle of restructuring its business, payouts are a question of priorities: capital is needed both to meet regulatory requirements and to develop new trading lines. Currently announced payouts across the market can be seen in the dividend calendar, and the nearest ones are here:

The tax side is the same as for any Russian issuer's shares: the base for investment transactions is determined by 13%.

What to compare it with

SPBE is properly compared not with commodity stocks but with other infrastructure and with the financial sector, where the logic is also "capital plus a stream of fees" rather than "assets plus production costs". The reviews closest in method are the Sber review and the T-Technologies review. A comparison with the Gazprom review, on the other hand, is useful precisely to see how different the metrics that come to the fore are for a company with fixed assets and for a company whose assets are a licence, a system and the trust of market participants. The full list of listed securities is in the stocks section, and definitions of terms are in the glossary.

What this review does not cover

An honest caveat: the site's data cannot reconstruct either the breakdown of turnover by new trading lines or the fate of the blocked assets — these are external factors not reflected in standard metrics. Any valuation of SPBE built on multiples alone tacitly assumes that current-period earnings will repeat; for this company that assumption needs separate justification and cannot simply be made by default.