West Africa Exchange Targets Telecoms Listings

West Africa’s stock exchange, BRVM, targets listings by the region’s telecoms firms and partnerships with international clearing houses to attract more foreign investors, its chief executive said on Wednesday.

Telecoms companies are some of the biggest companies in West Africa and the Abidjan-based bourse, on which Burkina Faso’s Onatel and Senegal’s Sonatel are listed, hopes they will go public as a way to keep revenues in domestic hands.

“The only way to share revenue with the population is to list the companies,” Edoh Kossi Amenounve told Reuters in an interview on the sidelines of an investor conference in London.

The exchange has already announced that it would list Mali’s main mobile operator, Societe Telecom du Mali (Sotelma), this year.

South African telecoms firm MTN is currently preparing for major initial public offerings of MTN Ghana and MTN Nigeria on the Ghanaian and Nigerian stock exchanges respectively, and Amenounve suggests it consider listing West African subsidiaries such as MTN Cote d’Ivoire on BRVM at a later date.

He also suggested French telecoms group Orange should consider listing its Ivory Coast subsidiary.

“If they succeed to list in Nigeria and Ghana this can quickly lead them to consider their position in the Francophone zone,” he said, adding he hopes telecoms firms will list in the next three to five years.

BRVM is also in talks with private equity funds including ECP, Tunisia’s Africinvest, and Mauritian group AFIG Funds, to encourage them to list companies on the exchange as part of their exit strategies for assets, Amenounve said.