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Share sales in the Persian Gulf are likely to rebound as family-owned companies seek to fund expansion, an adviser at NM Rothschild & Sons Ltd. said.
“Risk appetite is returning to the capital markets,” Paul Reynolds, Rothschild’s head of Middle East debt and equity advisory, said in an interview in Dubai yesterday. “Retail appetite is coming back. For the right companies it will be feasible as well as desirable” to sell stock.
Companies in the Middle East and North Africa raised $2.25 billion in 11 sales this year, about a tenth of the $21.7 billion raised in the year-earlier period, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
The Bloomberg GCC 200 Index, a market-weighted index of top 200 companies in the six Gulf Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Kuwait, has advanced 14.9 percent this year as the global economy emerges from recession and oil prices rise. The countries pump more than 20 percent of the world’s crude oil.
“The public equity markets are volatile, but at some point the requirements of raising money will start to match off against risk aversion issues and the market will start working again,” Reynolds, also a spokesman for the Association of Corporate Treasurers in the Middle East, said. |