Onyema promises improved primary market activities for 2017

The Chief Executive Officer, Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE), Mr Oscar Onyema has said that the equities market will witness at least one Initial Public Offering (IPO) this year.

Oscar at the 2016 NSE market recap for 2016 and outlook for 2017 in Lagos on Thursday said that bourse will focus on achieving its goal of becoming a more agile and demutualized exchange in 2017.

According to him, “we expect to see a revival of Supplementary Listings, return of the new issue market, and potentially one IPO since the equity market is a forward indicator of the economy.

“Cognizant of the ever evolving economic realities on ground, the NSE will take an adaptive approach to strategy execution in 2017.

“In the immediate future, the NSE will focus on achieving its goal of becoming a more agile and demutualized exchange and will fast track efforts towards developing innovative products such as exchange traded derivatives to provide investors with tools to better weather economic realities in 2017.

“We intend to strengthen our thought leadership efforts with policymakers to drive policies that will free up the system and promote the ease of doing business in Nigeria.

“We believe that incentive schemes for sectors of the economy that can support a pivot to export led economy will be beneficial and systematic removal of impediments to doing business and therefore reduction of leakages will attract private sector investments.

“From a capital market liquidity standpoint, we will enhance our cross-border integration efforts via African Securities Exchange Association’s (ASEA) African Exchange Linkage Project (AELP) model and the West African Capital Market Integration (WACMI) program.

“We will also continue our engagement efforts with the Government to promote the listing of privatized state owned entities (SOEs), as well as engage with the Private sector issuers for listings across all of our product categories.

“We anticipate that secondary market activity will be challenged initially as the impact of various policy measures work their way through the system.”

He explained that the Exchange was cautiously optimistic, as consensus estimates suggest a moderate recovery for Nigeria in 2017, provided that policy makers implement the right combination of policy.