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Dubai has announced plans to list 10 government and state-owned companies on the Dubai Financial Market (DFM) and expand the stock market’s size to 3 trillion dirhams ($816 billion).
The emirate also launched a market-making fund worth 2 billion dirhams and another fund worth 1 billion dirhams, to encourage companies in the technology sector to list on the local stock market, said Sheikh Maktoum bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Deputy Ruler of Dubai and Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance.
The goal is to cement Dubai’s status as a leading financial hub.
“We want to move to develop the financial markets very quickly during the coming period,” bin Mohammed said on Twitter.
“Dubai has a stock market, Nasdaq Dubai and a gold and commodities exchange. We are the second-largest Islamic sukuk centre in the world and the third-highest country in diamond trading. We have one of the largest gold exchanges and we are the largest country to re-export tea and we have exchanges to trade these commodities. Our next stop will be to organise digital assets for the future,” he said.
The government official, who oversees the local bourse, led the first meeting of Dubai’s Securities and Exchange Higher Committee on Monday.
He also revealed plans to create a Dubai markets supervisory committee and specialised courts to settle securities disputes in Dubai.
Dubai has been named one of the world’s leading financial hubs. The emirate ranked 18th out of 126 destinations in the latest Global Financial Centres Index, which measures the competitiveness of major financial centres around the world.
As of September this year, the DFM has added more than 3,700 new investors to the market, including 467 institutions, bringing the total investor size to more than 849,000.
The emirate's specialised economic free zone, the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), is considered the leading financial hub in the Middle East region, with over 24,000 professionals working for more than 2,300 companies.
(Reporting by Cleofe Maceda; editing by Seban Scaria)
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