Mohsin Mujtaba Director Products and Market Development, QSE during the webinar.
Qatar Stock Exchange (QSE) has been a leader in sustainability and ESG issue and initiating Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) platform. ESG is the future of investing in Qatar and companies are showing interest about ESG requirements, said an official during an online event.
Bloomberg in association with Qatar Financial Centre (QFC) organised a webinar entitled ‘ESG Regulations and Requirements: Qatar Stock Exchange’ which shed light on ESG regulations and requirements.
Adressing the event, Mohsin Mujtaba Director Products and Market Development, QSE said, “On Qatar Stock Exchange side we embarked on this journey back in 2016 with ESG reporting guidelines that were very basic on the back of World Federation of Exchange and the Sustainable Stock Exchanges guidelines. We are one of the first signatories in the region for UN Sustainable Stock Exchange Initiative.”
"The journey started in 2016 of educating and talking to the corporates and encouraging them to start disclosing and since then, more and more companies have been reporting," he added.
There are a lot of things happening in the ESG front. “We do recognise and it is part of our stated objective that ESG is the future of investing in Qatar and how we are going to package Qatar as an investment destination. We are not the largest market in the region in terms of market cap but ESG is the niche that we are carving for ourselves to be the destination of choice for ESG sensitive investors,” he said.
“We are now working with the investors - the asset owners to see how much capital locally can be invested into the companies with the ESG filter. We did launch with ESG index and have seen a lot more companies are interested to talk to us and understand that how that index is gauging and rating those companies so that they can improve their ESG disclosure,” Mujtaba noted.
“Last year we embarked on the journey of partnering with one of the index providers to start looking at how global investors are looking at the ESG matrix and how they are rating them. This is where we are having more meaningful conversations with corporates in Qatar and we are also having conversations with large asset owners who are fully behind ESG index in terms of their support.”
Speaking about the collection of data in the companies, Mujtaba said, “With the passage of time and with the evolution of Internet of Things (IoT) in the companies specially on ‘e’ side of things, it will become a lot more easier with companies adopting and installing IoT device whether it is in factories, data centers. So, the data collection is not going to be a challenge from a corporation point of view, I think the challenge will remain on the reporting side about what data is important and relevant for them.”
Companies will need to have conversation with their investors to come up with a standard which is more relevant to them. “As an exchange we are bridging conversation with global index providers who are talking to global investors to bring some sort of standardisation in terms of data that is required. We are having conversations not only with the corporates but also with the asset owners to understand how ESG is relevant for their long-term sustainability objectives of their portfolio and future generations. We are working on potentially launching a fund in Qatar that will incentivize everybody to give more attention to this,” he said.
“Ever since we have launched the guidelines, the focus was more on the corporate side to encourage disclosing more and more. Around 30 percent of the listed companies in Qatar are now actively reporting and disclosing on the ESG requirements which is a good achievement over a period of time and there are conversations happening with the regulators to make it mandatory,” he added.
