İMKB visits companies to encourage public offer

ISTANBUL - Anatolia News Agency

DAILY NEWS photo, Hasan ALTINIŞIK

The Istanbul Stock Exchange (İMKB) is aiming to encourage Turkish companies to go public by paying visits to them, İMKB President İbrahim Turhan has said.

Turhan told Anatolia news agency yesterday that the plan was to visit every single company in the Istanbul Chamber of Industry’s (İSO) top 1000 companies list in order to try to convince them to become publicly-traded.

“We have visited 63 companies in the last three months, and 250 more companies will be visited in the following two years. Only 127 of the 1000 companies on the list are publicly-traded companies. We believe that this number will increase and our stock exchange will develop if we make these visits,” Turhan said.

Benefits of going public

The companies that went public this year raised a total of $2.9 billion, according to figures recently revealed. Some 25 of these companies went public for the first time in 2012 and raised $403 million, while the secondary stock sale of Halkbank raised $2.5 billion.

The amount of income from public offerings has increased year by year. While it was $2.1 billion with 22 public offerings in 2010 and $800 million with 27 public offerings in 2011, this rose to $2.9 billion in 2012.

Companies can secure low-cost financial sources from public offerings, while trading on the İMKB also serves to accelerate their institutionalization process, said the İMKB Quotation Manager. He stressed that public offerings also contributed to companies’ growth and profitability.

The companies whose shares trade in stock exchanges have free advertising in the national and international press. Their information also spreads to domestic and foreign investors, creating the opportunities to bring together different companies in the same sector to cooperate, establish joint ventures, and work together on similar issues.