DSE to attract new cos, says its president

FE Report

Dhaka Stock Exchange (DSE) will take a fresh move to attract new companies to float shares in the stock market.

"We are going to initiate meetings with the top directors of the companies so that they feel encouraged to go public on their own way," newly-elected DSE president Md Shakil Rizvi told the FE in an interview recently.

Mr Shakil said the renewed DSE move will help remove the widening gap between demand and supply.

Commenting on the latest trends of the stock market, Mr Shakil said the prime bourse of the country will again meet the National Board of Revenue (NBR) and Finance Ministry to get final assurance on getting exemption from new taxes.

"There is no room of panic for the investors as both the NBR and Finance Ministry are convinced with our submissions that fresh imposition of taxes on investment in stock market will hit the market," Mr Shakil added.

The daily turnover dipped below Tk 6.0 billion recently when NBR and Finance Ministry proposed to impose tax on investment in stock market.

The turnover on DSE, however crossed Tk 15.0 billion-mark Sunday.

Replying to a question on the inconveniences of investors in dealing the odd lot shares, the DSE chief said a joint move with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will be launched soon to mitigate the sufferings.

"It is true that lot of investors cannot transact odd lot shares smoothly due to mismatch of offered price and other attendant problems and we will raise the issue with the SEC and listed companies so that offer of bonus shares and rights don't mix up with odd numbers," Mr Shakil said.

He said since the oddlot problem is a big issue, DSE cannot solve the crisis overnight, rather strong cooperation among the listed companies, bourses and the regulatory body is imperative.

Replying to another question, Mr Shakil said the new board of directors of the DSE will also put thrust on developing the IT facilities of the stock market.

"We will make the existing IT platform more user-friendly through changing the parameters," Mr Shakil said.

The automated trading system of DSE has failed to operate successfully because of its 'poor capacity', market operators and investors alleged.

The automated trading system was installed in the second half of 1998.

DSE, however upgraded the system several times since 2005 wasting huge amount of money but failed to serve the investors to have a fool-proof system as the management failed to forecast the growth of the market.

The latest up-gradation became effective on March 27, 2008.

"The IT support of DSE is now very crucial as the present volume of share transaction is much more higher than any of the previous periods and the market will see tremendous inflow of new shares due to approval of big IPOs and issuance of bonus and rights shares by the listed companies," said a market operator.

DSE's trading volumes have grown exponentially in the last 3-5 years and averaging about 130,000 trades per day.

DSE is running its online trading using TESA application under Tandem HW, supplied and supported by Cambridge Solutions Ltd, India.

DSE now gets network service from 5 network service providers (NSPs). They are X-Net Ltd, DhakaCom Ltd, Royal Green Online Ltd, Ranks ITT and Link3 Technologies Ltd.