Ms Arunma Oteh
Stakeholders in the capital market on Wednesday called for sustained confidence building, as a primary condition for achieving the target of 500 listed firms on the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) by 2018.
They also called for legislation requiring compulsory listing of multinationals on the NSE, as conditions, which they told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos, among others, were necessary to achieve the goal.
NAN recalls that Ms Arunma Oteh, SEC Director-General, recently said that the NSE was targeting to list 500 companies in the next five years.
Oteh said the NSE was also targeting market capitalisation of $1 trillion dollars by 2016, following which the bourse needed to attract companies in oil and gas, power and telecommunications sectors to list their shares on NSE to meet the target.
Harrison Owoh, the Managing Director, H J Trust & Investment Limited, Lagos, said that government should enact a law to make listing of multinationals compulsory, just as incentives be given to companies seeking to list on the nation's bourse.
Also, he said, the high fees and other requirements should be scaled down to encourage listing.
Boniface Okezie, President, Progressive Shareholders Association of Nigeria (PSAN), said that SEC and NSE should encourage investors that left the market during the global financial meltdown to return.
Okezie said that investors' perception that many equities had depreciated after the melt down was a challenge and the regulators should urgently rebuild confidence in the market.
