The region’s stock exchanges are enjoying a new lease of life. After years of disappointing flows, Prague Stock Exchange is set to be reinvigorated by the initial public offering (IPO) of GE Money Bank, the sixth-biggest Czech lender by assets, a joint venture between General Electric and local energy group Energeticky a Prumyslovy Holding. That upcoming stock sale could value the lender at up to $1.9bn.
Bucharest, aided by Romania’s reform and privatisation programme, also hosts one of the region’s most vibrant bourses, regularly completing sizeable landmark stock offerings.
Another notable regional development was the launch in March of SEE Link, an order routing system set up to connect the stock exchanges of Bulgaria, Croatia and Macedonia. Based in Skopje, SEE link announced a sizeable coup a few weeks after its launch, following the addition of the far larger Athens Stock Exchange.
But despite rising concerns about the authoritarian inclinations of the Polish government, few bourses across emerging Europe can compete with the depth and scale of the Warsaw Stock Exchange (WSE). In 2015, according to data from Dealogic, 14 IPOs worth $477m were completed in Poland’s capital, against 13 initial stock sales worth $397m the previous year. By comparison, no IPOs at all were completed in 2015 in either of its chief regional rivals, Bucharest or Vienna. Over the past eight years, 185 new companies have joined the main board in Warsaw, raising more than $11bn. And though the era of major state-led privatisations, which laid the foundations for the WSE’s rise, is now largely over, the bourse has neatly switched tack, attracting smaller, privately run firms and larger foreign corporates into the fold.
This year has also started with a bang, with X-Trade Brokers set to debut on the WSE in early May, in an initial public offering that should value the Polish online brokerage at €308.9m ($355m).