CAIRO - 22 February 2022: Minister of Finance, Mohamed Maait, and his deputy Ahmed Kojak, representatives of the securities industry parties, representatives of the Central Bank, and the settlement company owned by the Central Bank and the Ministry of Finance, in the presence of Mohamed Farid, Chairman of the Egyptian Exchange (EGX), his deputy Ahmed El-Sheikh, and a number of stock exchange leaders, opened Tuesday’s trading session on the occasion of the official launch of four sub-indices to measure and track the performance of the listed Egyptian treasury bonds traded on the EGX according to different maturity periods.

This comes after the Egyptian Stock Exchange’s Indicators Committee adopted the new sub-indices methodology, as a continuation of its efforts to develop indicators for measuring the performance of traded securities, allowing the availability of investment products that follow these indicators and enhancing the diversity of available investment products to meet the needs of all categories of investors. This is in line with international best practices in the field of developing and managing stock exchange indices, for the first time in the history of the Egyptian Stock Exchange since 1883.

The indicators include the most traded bonds, while the market value of the security determines the weight of each issue within the index. The index takes into account both the return resulting from the change in bond prices, and the return resulting from the eligible coupons, which reflects the total return for the performance of the government bonds that make up the index.
 
This step is integrated with the comprehensive vision adopted and implemented by the Egyptian Stock Exchange management to develop and raise the efficiency of the government bond market, to enhance its liquidity, activate its trading and help create an active secondary market that helps the Egyptian government represented by the Ministry of Finance in accessing financing at a competitive cost.

The EGX had launched the first general index in the history of the Egyptian Stock Exchange, to follow up the performance of the listed treasury bonds traded in the stock market, following the launch of the first integrated system for trading Egyptian treasury bonds, fully developed by the EGX in December 2020 and implemented during 2021 fully.
 
Mohamed Maait, Minister of Finance, said that the ambitious program adopted and implemented by the EGX to develop the market for restricted government treasury bonds traded in the stock market to integrate with the efforts of the Ministry of Finance and its action plans aimed at prolonging the life of debt instruments; which is expected to reach 3.7 years by the end of the current fiscal year instead of 1.3 years previously, which relieves pressures on the public treasury,
 
It is expected that the new indicators developed and launched by the Egyptian Stock Exchange administration will contribute to raising the efficiency of the treasury bond pricing process and enhancing its circulation, according to Maait.

The Minister of Finance, Rapporteur of the Government Proposals Committee, Maait, said that the government is very enthusiastic to complete and activate the program to expand the base of ownership of state-owned companies through the stock market, revealing that there are new government offerings before the end of the current fiscal year.
 
For his part, Mohamed Farid, Chairman of the Egyptian Stock Exchange, said that the development of new indicators, whether the general index or sub-indices that reflect the different maturities of bonds, aims to raise the efficiency of the process of tracking and measuring the overall performance of government bonds, and thus enhance the vision and investment attractiveness, in order to support efforts to enhance market liquidity and trading, and diversify investment options in front of all categories of current and potential investors.