The general manager of the BSE, Valentin Ionescu, announced that the institution he is leading intends to buy stakes in smaller exchanges in the region, a plan for which it set aside five million Euros.
Given the ambitions of the management of the BSE to turn the company into a regional-level player, it has two avenues of action available: it can decide to buy minority stakes to gain influence, or it will buy controlling interests.
In order to find what the BSE could buy in the region, we"ve looked at our neighboring countries, searching for exchanges which could be an easy prey for the Bucharest Stock Exchange. In order to be able to make the comparison, we must first mention the coordinates of the Romanian market: a capitalization of 28.76 billion Euros (according to the website of the BSE) for the main market, and an additional 2.68 billion Euros for the "Rasdaq" market and an average turnover of 7.79 million Euros over the last 12 months.
The nearest target is the Moldovan Stock Exchange, which has an average daily turnover of 31,000 Euros, according to the statement of Valentin Ionescu. The Exchange of Tirana (Albania) provides no information on turnover or market capitalization. It is 100% owned by the Albanian Ministry of Finance and has a share capital of 146,000 Euros. It was founded in 1996 and it sees only isolated trades.
The Exchange of Belgrade (Serbia) is owned by the state and by a group of brokerages and banks. It has a daily average turnover of 775,870 Euros for stocks and 172,000 Euros for bonds. The market capitalization is 7.62 billion Euros, almost four times smaller than that of the BSE.
The former Yugoslavian republic has two more small exchanges, which are easy targets for the BSE and small potatoes to the Vienna exchange. The Montenegro Exchange, founded before the one of Bucharest, in 1993, wasn"t successful i
