(Corrects spelling of company name in penultimate paragraph
of story published July 26.)
The Warsaw Stock Exchange’s purchase
of a trading platform from NYSE Euronext may be the first step
in an alliance as the Polish bourse prepares to go public, said
Duncan Niederauer, the U.S. company’s chief executive officer.
Central Europe’s biggest equity venue by value agreed to
acquire a cash and derivatives trading platform provided by NYSE
Euronext’s Technologies, the two bourses said July 12 in a
statement. They didn’t disclose the financial terms.
The relationship with the Warsaw market is a “strategic
partnership that is going to go far beyond technology,”
Niederauer said today in New York. “They are positioned to be a
winner in that region, and we aim to help them succeed.”
The technology will make the Warsaw exchange more
attractive to companies planning public offerings and to
investors trading on the market, said Ludwik Sobolewski, the
Polish company’s chief executive officer. The Warsaw exchange
plans an initial public offering in November as Poland’s
treasury ministry seeks to sell shares in the firm to help
finance the government’s widening budget deficit.
The treasury ministry will hold about “35 percent of the
share-holding capital” in the company, Sobolewski said. The
Warsaw market may consider selling a stake to an exchange
operator, he said. Companies listed on the exchange have a total
capitalization of $156 billion, according to Bloomberg data.
The exchange executives spoke at a press event at the New
York Stock Exchange.
Global Business
NYSE Euronext is expanding its trading-related technology
services as the company alters its mix of global businesses. The
company earned 17 percent of its net revenue in the first
quarter of this year from technology services, up from 14
percent a year earlier, Chief Financial Officer Michael
Geltzeiler said on an earnings call on May 4.
Niederauer said he expects the Warsaw exchange to become a
“capital markets hub” in central and eastern Europe. The
alliance could expand to listings, market data products and
cross trading of cash and derivatives over time, he said.
While NYSE Euronext “wouldn’t see a need to do similar
things with other exchanges in the region,” the relationship
with the Warsaw exchange could facilitate investors’ access to
other smaller markets in that area, he said.
Double Volume
The CEE Stock Exchange Group, which includes bourses in
Vienna, Budapest, Prague and Ljubljana, may double the volume
traded within four years as the markets introduce the same
electronic system, said Michael Buhl, the Vienna Stock
Exchange’s co-chief executive officer. The three other markets
plan to switch to the Deutsche Boerse Group’s Xetra platform,
which the Vienna venue already uses, by the end of 2011.
The Warsaw exchange gets a third of its volume from clients
outside Poland, Sobolewski said. Another third comes from
institutions trading within the country and the rest from
individual investors.
Companies in Poland raised $4.28 billion in 32 IPOs so far
this year, exceeding the $3.89 billion raised in Brazil in eight
IPOs, according to Bloomberg data. The largest IPOs on the
Warsaw exchange were energy utility Tauron Polska Energia SA,
which raised $1.25 billion on June 30, and insurer Powszechny
Zaklad Ubezpieczen, which sold $2.79 billion of stock that
started trading on May 12.
The Warsaw market traded shares valued at 3.89 billion
euros in June, compared with 2.94 billion a year earlier, data
from the Brussels-based Federation of European Securities
Exchanges showed.
To contact the reporter on this story:
Nina Mehta in New York at
nmehta24@bloomberg.net.
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