Brazilian investors to surf Covid-19 vaccine wave

As part of the regulators’ efforts to increase local investors’ access to foreign investment opportunities, 72 new Brazilian Depositary Receipts (BDRs) — negotiable instruments traded on the São Paulo stock exchange and backed by shares of foreign companies — debuted on the domestic market on October 19, granting Brazilians access to the stocks of leading pharma companies as the world seeks a Covid-19 vaccine. 

The new assets include British-Swedish lab AstraZeneca, German pharma company BioNTech, and Switzerland’s Novartis. Before their inclusion, only American pharma firm Johnson & Johnson was traded locally.  

Besides the pharma big-hitters, the inclusion of European, Asian, Latin American and African companies as locally traded foreign stocks is a milestone for the BDR market, which was largely concentrated on U.S.-traded assets. The decision follows the Brazilian Securities Commission (CVM) early move to open BDR trading to individual investors.

AstraZeneca’s vaccine, developed in partnership with the University of Oxford, is currently in trials carried out by São Paulo’s Federal University (Unifesp), while trials for Pfizer and BioNTech’ss BNT162 mRNA-based vaccine are going ahead in the states of São Paulo and Bahia.

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