Nigerian Stock Exchange has just announced that the planned Cross Border Secondary Listing of 3,758,151,504 ordinary shares of Airtel Africa Plc has been postponed.
According to the Exchange, the postponement was necessitated by the need to ensure that Airtel meets all the post NSE approval pre-requisites for listing on the Exchange.
“However, the facts before the listing event will hold as planned at 11.00 a.m. on Friday, July 5, 2019.” The NSE said
The NSE said it would provide further communication on the issue when all the conditions for the listing in its market had been met.
The NSE had on Thursday, said in a circular that it granted a waiver to the firm as it did not meet the minimum requirement of 300 shareholders as of the day the listing was approved by the National Council of the Exchange.
In contrast to a circular issued, Mr Oscar Onyema, chief executive officer, NSE, said there were processes yet to be followed and papers yet to be signed by the firm.
He said, “This is a highly-regulated matter; there are back-end processes that need to be followed by the company. As soon as all that is done, we will announce the new date of the listing; as of now, we have no date in mind.”
However, speculations are growing among analysts and investors that the postponed listing would be held on Monday, July 8.
Analysts at Vetiva Capital Management said, “The long-awaited secondary listing of Airtel Africa is set to be completed on Monday, July 8, 2019.
“This follows a postponement from the initially planned date of Friday, July 5, due to a manual allotment process of transferring the shares to new investors, which had left the listing with less than 300 individual shareholders, the minimum required for the listing to take place on Friday.”
They said Airtel’s addition of approximately N1.36tn in market capitalisation to the NSE would lift the bourse to a market cap of over N14tn, as well as effectively create a new major sector represented on the Nigerian exchange, the telecommunications sector.
