Rashid bin Ali Al Mansoori, QSE’s Chief Executive Officer
The Qatar Stock Exchange (QSE) has prepared a three-year strategic plan and aims to launch derivatives market. In a meeting with the Qatar Financial Markets Authority, the QSE presented its strategic plan with the regulator and discussed several important matters including product diversification and short selling and listing rules. “We held yesterday a Strategy Session over a business lunch with the Qatar Financial Markets Authority, during which we presented our 3-year strategic plan to align with the Regulator and update it with the progress achieved,” QSE’s Chief Executive Officer, Rashid bin Ali Al Mansoori, said in a tweet yesterday.
“During the meeting, we also discussed various topics such as launch of a derivatives market and upgrade of Qatar market from Emerging Market to Advanced Market status, as well as product diversification and enhancement of SLB, short selling and listing rules,” he added. In the past, QSE has taken several measures and initiatives to attract individual and institutional investors. It implemented a 1:10 stock split in 2019 across all companies on the exchange reducing the nominal value of shares to QR1. The purpose of the stock split was to improve market liquidity through increased trading activity (generating more shares available for trading) and to make singular equity shares more affordable to the investors.
Within the first month following the stock split, weekly trading volumes on the exchange more than doubled driven by foreign institutional investors in addition to increased trading activity from local individual investors. Market liquidity has been boosted by increased trading activity from foreign investors.
Non-Qatari institutional investors have become much more active in the past few years. The rise in activity followed an increase in foreign ownership limits for QSE listed companies to 49 percent in 2014 from 25 percent. This was done as part of Qatar’s commitment to increase foreign ownership limits following the country’s upgrade to ‘emerging market’ status on the MSCI Emerging Market Index in 2014., which subsequently attracted $2.2bn in foreign capital inflows by 2019.
Qatar was similarly upgraded on the FTSE Russell Global Equity Index Series over 2016 and 2017, further enhancing the stock market’s depth and liquidity and expanding its international investor base. QSE was among the first stock exchanges in the world to encourage transparency and disclosure by promoting the digitalisation of environment, social and governance (ESG) data.
With the support of the Qatar Financial Markets Authority, QSE had launched its online platform Sustainability and ESG Dashboard in 2018 to help listed companies to communicate their ESG and sustainability performance to investors and other relevant stakeholders.
The online platform also seeks to improve the attractiveness of individual companies and the QSE as a whole to international investors.
