The Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange expects to match or exceed the record number of listings it achieved in 2021 as it continues to add new products and expand its investor base, its managing director and chief executive said.
The bourse’s benchmark FTSE ADX General Index was among the best-performing exchanges worldwide last year, having rallied more than 62 percent in 2021. It is the best-performing bourse in the GCC this year, having climbed about 14 percent since January.
Its market value was up about 25 percent so far this year at more than Dh2.015 trillion ($549 billion) on Monday, making it the Middle East and Arab world’s second-largest exchange.
“We are confident that the listing this year will not be less than what we have seen last year,” Saeed Al Dhaheri, who is also managing director of the exchange, told The National.
“We are very optimistic. We are seeing the appetite from so many companies to come to Abu Dhabi and list … whether they are UAE companies or companies that are in the GCC, Europe, the US, Africa, and Asia,” he said, when asked if the bourse could top its 2021 performance.
The ADX has a “good pipeline” of initial public offerings, with healthcare and FinTech companies among others expressing an interest in listing on the exchange this year, Mr. Al Dhaheri said.
“We have a mix of pipeline GREs [government-related entities], we have family businesses … it is a mix of everything,” he said.
There were nine listings on the exchange last year, including the initial public offerings of Adnoc Drilling, which raised $1.1bn in October, and Fertiglobe, the world’s largest seaborne exporter of urea and ammonia combined, which reaped about $795 million.
The ADX has carried the IPO momentum into 2022. Abu Dhabi Ports Group, the operator of industrial cities and free zones in the emirate, began trading on the ADX in February.
Borouge, the joint venture between Adnoc and Austrian chemicals producer Borealis, successfully closed its $2bn IPO, the biggest share sale on the ADX, in a deal that was about 42 times oversubscribed.
