The net foreign investments in the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange (ADX) stood at 1.1 billion dirhams ($300 million) for the first nine months of 2018, Rashed Al Blooshi, the chief executive of ADX said on Monday.

“The foreign net position is positive and stood at 1.1 billion dirhams,” Al Blooshi told reporters on the sidelines of the annual conference of the Federation of Euro-Asian Stock Exchanges (FEAS) in Abu Dhabi.

ADX’s manager of corporate communications, Abdulrahman Saleh Al-Khateeb added that the total institutional investment inflows were around 1.6 billion dirhams for the same period.

However, the two officials did not give comparative figures for the same period last year. Figures from Refinitiv’s Eikon show that trading volumes for the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange were 50.9 percent lower year-on-year for the first nine months of 2018.

Al Blooshi did not comment on plans for new Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) on ADX's primary market this year. Thus far, there has not been an IPO on the main Abu Dhabi stock market in 2018, although there have been a couple of filings on its secondary market – the most recent being Reem Investments earlier this month. The last IPO on the main market was the fuel distribution unit of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) in December 2017.

Al Blooshi said that around 966,000 shareholders - 40 percent of whom are foreigners – hold stocks in firms listed on ADX, adding that 70 percent of daily trading on the exchange is by institutional investors. 

“Thank god, we are a very special market in attracting institutional and international investments,”  Al Blooshi added.

(Reporting by Yasmine Saleh; Editing by Michael Fahy)

(yasmine.saleh@refinitiv.com).


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