Baku, Azerbaijan, Aug. 22
By Azad Hasanli - Trend:
The stock market in Azerbaijan is at the stage of natural growth, Chairman of Managerial Board of Association of Azerbaijani Stock Market Participants (AASMP) Jeyhun Ibrahimov told Trend, commenting on the current situation with stock exchange transactions.
In 1H2018, the volume of exchange transactions with shares amounted to 68.6 million manats, while this figure for the same period last year equaled to 650.5 million manats.
However, Ibrahimov explained, last year such a volume was formed mainly due to the January issue of shares for 600 million manats by the International Bank of Azerbaijan.
"Thanks to this, the volume of stock market exceeded 600 million manats last year. However, on the other hand, this year the volume of transactions in the secondary market of shares amounted to 42.4 million manats [data for six months], while this figure for the same period last year equaled to 1.4 million manats. Given this, we can say that the natural growth is observed in the stock market this year", he said.
At the same time, Ibrahimov believes that the volume of exchange transactions in Azerbaijan is less than in neighboring countries.
"The potential of our market is many times greater than the current one. The main reason for the insufficient use of the potential is that companies lack transparency. As a result, investors are more interested to carry out REPO operations."
Ibrahimov believes that certain responsibility for the further development of the market falls on professional market participants, who should educate companies.
"By the way, work in this direction has intensified in recent years," he added.
The total turnover of exchange transactions over all instruments on the Baku stock exchange in January-June 2018 amounted to about 11.73 billion manats (an increase of 2.7 times over the year).
The volume of state securities market totaled 6.01 billion manats (annual growth by 5.4 times), stock market - 68,6 million manats (decrease of 9.5 percent over the year), debt market - 336,97 million manats (decrease of 9 percent over the year), REPO transactions - 446,16 million manats (annual growth by 40 times), the derivative instruments market - 4.85 billion manats (growth by 2.2 times).
---
Follow the author on Twitter: @AzadHasanli