Dubai
Nasdaq Dubai plans to expand its product offerings to investors at the same time offering flexibility, Hamed Ali, chief executive officer at Nasdaq Dubai said on Sunday.
Depa converted its listing currency to dirhams from US dollars, which had been the listing currency since its IPO in 2008. The move was aimed to strengthen the company’s link to regional institutional and individual investors and support pricing.
“The way we look at the benefit of this platform, based on the stakeholders that are involved. For the issuer what does this mean, you are giving a lot of flexibility to the issuer in terms of which currency they want to list in. As Nasdaq Dubai it allows us to attract more companies based on the flexibility we offer,” Ali told Gulf News.
“Today the investor is demanding listing in dirham, or Saudi riyals. So the key message is flexibility. You are catering the market depending on their needs by offering those products and currencies they would like to have,” Ali said.
Nasdaq Dubai plans to introduce more products by keeping the investor in mind.
“Our theme for 2018 is to expand our product base. In the beginning of this year, we have expanded the number of futures offerings and the type of futures offering by launching index products. There will be more index products that we will be bringing and we will launching more products. This is our top priority this year,” Ali said. More than 2.5 million contracts have been traded on Nasdaq Dubai’s futures market in single stock contracts till mid-February, with a total value of more than Dh500 million.
“The principle that we are following in terms of introducing those products is giving power to the investors by giving them choices so be it hedging or long term investment or short term. We look at it as a year where we expand,” he added.
Depa is trying to spruce up volumes
Depa is trying to spruce up volumes in its shares, its group chief executive Hamish Tyrwhitt said.
“We have some long term stable anchor investors, and we have a relatively small free float, and most of that free float is in the UAE, so we are trying to make it attractive to the local market here,” Tyrwhitt said on the sidelines of the listing. “We are trying to improve our liquidity and increase the size of the free float.”
The company has undertaken a number of steps to increase participation in its shares. They appointed Shuaa Capital as the liquidity provider, and started to report in Arabic and English.
“We are producing a sustainability report. A lot of institutional investors on a governance sense requires sustainability report,” Tyrwhitt said.
Separately, Nasdaq Dubai also listed $1.25 billion sukuk by the Islamic Development Bank (IDB), bringing the total value of sukuk listing on the bourse to $11.5 billion.
