Telecoms giant Safaricom Ltd., a mobile phone company that is the biggest listing by market capitalization on the Nairobi Stock Exchange, is selling KSh 4.49 billion shillings ($56 million) of 5-year bonds from 1 Dec, according a report on Bloomberg.
Africa’s capital markets have set themselves a tough programme of action, following the executive committee and annual general meetings of the African Stock Exchanges Association held last week (10 Nov). Plans include an improved website, development of a broad-based pan-African index which could also lead to a pan-African Exchange Traded Fund to be cross-listed on several exchanges. The continent’s securities markets are also to lobby on improving the business and investment environment in African countries as this could help Africa get a bigger share of business.
African securities exchanges need to play a stronger role in harnessing Africa’s growth opportunities. This was the view of Sunil Benimadhu, President of the African Securities Exchanges Association and CEO of the Stock Exchange of Mauritius, when he addressed the 14th annual conference in Livingstone, Zambia, held last week (10-12 November).
The battle of the African trading systems hots up as South Africa’s Securities and Trading Technology company also promotes its systems at the African Stock Exchanges Association gathering in Zambia (10-12 November).
The London Stock Exchange trading outage on 2 November and the subsequent delay of its migration of the LSE’s main trading to MllenniumIT’s platform is likely to be topic at African Stock Exchanges Association.
Technology is the driver of securities exchanges around the world – currently there are big battles for supremacy in a range of markets and disclosure and clearing and settlement after the trade are also coming to the fore. Africa should be no different and the next few months could see big progress.
Kenyan venture capital company East Africa Capital Partners Ltd is to begin raising its second fund next year, with a target size of USD250 million, after its success in fully investing $100 million of the first African Technology, Media and Telecommunications (ATMT) fund. The new fund is to focus on information technology, media and real estate.
Liquidity is up, while the number of days for settlement and cases of fraud are down in bond trading as fixed-income traders and investors flock to the Automated Trading System (ATS) of the Nairobi Stock Exchange. According to report in Kenya’s Business Daily, citing data provided by NSE, the value of bonds traded by the end of May was KSh 177.5 billion ($2.2 billion), up 60% on the KSh 110.6 billion traded in the same period in 2009.
Adlevo Capital Managers (www.adlevocapital.com) announced on 10 June that it has completed the first closing of Adlevo Capital Africa LLC fund with capital commitments of US$52 million. The fund will make expansion capital investments into companies with technology-enabled business models across sub-Saharan Africa.
Interest in African sovereign debt has been climbing again in recent months. Angola plans to issue a $1 billion – $2 billion benchmark bond., Kenya, Nigeria and Mauritius and many other countries have flourishing debt markets and international interest is good in high-yielding hard-currency bonds such as those issued by the Republic of Congo and Cote d’Ivoire.
Fears of the potential impact of IT disruption on African capital markets, combined with a long-running initiative to pool fragmented markets for more liquidity, led to a shock decision by the African markets association today to switch to a single African market platform at short notice.
Sunil Benimadhu, Chief Executive Officer of the Stock Exchange of Mauritius: We have had lots of discussion on how to link different markets. Lots of …
Kenya’s biggest mobile telecommunications company says it will continue to lead the market through its revolutionary mobile payment system M-PESA – already the world’s most successful with 9 million users – and through moving fast into data. Safaricom (www.safaricom.co.ke) has 78% market share (83% by revenue) and 15.2 million customers, according to Les Baillie, Chief Investor Relations Officer, and it will be hard for its competitors to catch up.
According to Zimbabwe’s Herald newspaper (www.herald.co.zw), it is only months before the introduction of a hub-and-spoke interconnectivity model for SADC stock exchanges as “the first significant step towards the integration of one of Africa’s economic regions”.
Telecoms have attracted some of Africa’s biggest and most lucrative equity deals and the 14 Feb sale of $10.7 billion of telecom assets further indicates the rising power from the East, this time India.
Financial information company McGregor BFA is offering investors new products, Realtime, which will stream data from South Africa’s JSE Limited securities exchange at lower cost
South African investors can trade two of the best-known IT names through the listing of single stock futures (SSFs) on Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) and Google (www.google.com) on the JSE Limited (www.jse.co.za) on 11 December.
The African Securities Exchanges Association (ASEA) is set to discuss “Global Crisis: Opportunities for African Capital Markets” within 2 weeks. The 13th ASEA conference will be hosted by the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) from 2-5 December 2009.
The Nigerian Stock Exchange is seeking some US$33 million in capital for its fifth software upgrade and also to help finance the Sierra Leone stock exchange.
The International Finance Corporation (www.ifc.org), a member of the World Bank Group, is investing $100 million into bringing the benefits of better telecommunications to many Nigerians via Helios Towers Nigeria Ltd.
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