The Director General of Dubai Financial Market (DFM) said the recent adjustment of regional stock exchanges was the result of unique market forces and some investors’ lack of investment maturity.
Essa Kazim was addressing over 350 businessmen in an event held recently at the Emirates Towers.
In his speech, Kazim reviewed the performance of DFM during the past period of 2006 compared to previous years. He also pointed out that the trading value has total of 53 billion dollars till the end of May 2006 where the average of daily trading increased to 444 million dollars compared with the average of daily trading totaling 368 million dollars during 2005. In addition, the trading volume increased during the above period to 18.8 billion shares with the daily average of 157 million shares compared to a daily average of 85 million shares. This was, of course, reflected on the number of transactions that amounted to 1.2 million trading transactions during the past period of 2006 with a daily average of 9,825 transactions compared to a daily average of 5,780 transactions during 2005.
Kazim has also said that investment opportunities available at Dubai financial Market are very attractive, especially for the foreign investors. This is clearly manifested in the number and formation of the investors at the market where the total number of investors amounted to 127,000 during 2003. In fact, 2% of these investors were foreign investors whose volume of trading reached around 13% at that time out of total trading. In contrast, the total number of investors reached 519,000 in May of 2006 when 25% of them constituted foreign investors whose trading totaled around 30%. Moreover, the number of brokerage companies increased from 18 in 2004 to reach 66 until May, 2006.
Explaining the performance of regional financial markets, Kazim made it clear that DFM achieved the first position in terms of increase in the price index during 2005. As DFM price index showed an increase of 132% during that year. In addition, DFM achieved the second position in terms of trading Value during 2005 after the Saudi Stock Market and secured the second position in terms of trading volume after Kuwaiti Stock Market.
As for the primary market, Kazim has pointed out that the total volume of IPO's and increase in paid capital has considerably High on the level of GCC countries during 2005, as it reached around 20 billion versus 6 billion dollars in 2004. In fact, Dubai has achieved the highest volume of IPO's and increase in paid capital on the regional level, as it amounted to 5.2 billion dollars followed by Abu Dhabi that achieved 4.9 billion dollars and then Kuwait with 3.3 billion dollars.
