SOFIA (Bulgaria), May 14 (SeeNews) – Initial and secondary public offerings (SPOs and IPOs) on Borsa Istanbul are expected to raise some $5.0 billion (3.85 billion euro) in 2013, the stock exchange’s executive vice chairman said on Tuesday.
“Till the end of 2013, we expect the total number of stock exchange listings to be 30, including the Emerging Companies Market,” Aydin Seyman told SeeNews in an exclusive interview on the sidelines of The Sound of Money economic forum in Sofia. The forum was organised by local business news portal Profit.bg. SeeNews was media partner of the event.
You can subscribe to our M&A newsletter here
By May 10, four companies - including Turkish low-cost air carrier Pegasus Hava Tasimaciligi [BIST:PGSUS], had performed IPOs and 17, including 10 family-owned businesses, had submitted IPO applications, Seyman added.
Borsa Istanbul, an entity incorporating the 28-year-old Istanbul Stock Exchange (ISE) with the Istanbul Gold Exchange (IAE) and the Izmir-based derivatives exchange, started operating last month. It expects to perform its own IPO in the end of 2015, Seyman said.
The ambition of the Turkish government is to expand it into a regional financial hub - "a smaller version of the London Stock Exchange," as Seyman described it.
As part of the drive towards this goal, the stock exchange operator is searching for a strategic foreign partner and plans to make its pick by the end of May, the official said.
“We are talking with the biggest stock exchanges in Europe and the U.S. and we would like to select a strategic partner at the end of this month,” Seyman said. “We are now processing their proposals. We will then sign with one of the candidates a letter of intent.”
The official was confident that the stock exchange, whose BIST National 100 index was the world's top performer last year, would keep up its outstanding performance. The main growth driver is the country’s macroeconomic and political stability, Seyman stressed.
The index’s 2013 year-to-date return is 15.55%.
($=0.7707 euro)