BSE planning to list, says its CEO
24 Nov 2009
The Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), the country's oldest bourse, is preparing for an initial public offer of shares in order to reduce its over-reliance on revenues from cash equity trading.
"We are in a preparatory stage for a listing," Madhu Kannan, chief executive of BSE, said at the Reuters India Investment Summit in Mumbai today. He, however, did not give a time frame for the listing.
"We are getting internally ready but the timeframe is something difficult to predict," Kannan said.
The BSE, in fact, has in recent times lost market share to its younger rival, the national Stock Exchange (NSE). The daily average turnover on the NSE in 2009 has been triple that of the BSE.
BSE, founded in 1875, has about 5,000 listed companies while NSE, which was founded in the early 1990s, has about 1,400 listed companies.
The bourse has 962 registered brokers (members) spread over 330 cities across the country. BSE's Wide Area Network (WAN) connects over 6,300 BSE Online Trading (BOLT) system trader workstations.