Mubasher: MSCI’s upgrade of Kuwait to an Emerging Market status is expected to attract $2.2 billion in investments to the GCC country, according to a report released by KAMCO Research.

Kuwait must implement the omnibus account structures and provide same national investor number cross trades to international institutional investors before the end of November 2019 in order to be upgraded in MSCI’s May-2020 semi-annual index review.

KAMCO’s report revealed that this upgrade resulted from reforms implemented by the Kuwaiti Capital Markets Authority (CMA) in less than three years including market segmentation, settlement times, foreign ownership limits, and increasing the breadth of the products traded on the exchange.  

“According to MSCI, Kuwait would carry an index weight of approximately 0.5% in the MSCI Emerging Markets Index which has around $1.8 trillion passive assets tracking the index,” the report noted.

The upgrade will include nine stocks listed on Boursa Kuwait, in Premier Market Index, with compiled market capitalisation of KWD 19.7 billion, making up 58.6% of the bourse’s market capitalisation.