Tanzania Seen Luring IPOs as State Scraps Foreign Caps

Tanzania, which has Africa’s best-performing stock market, lifted controls on foreign-share ownership, making it more enticing for companies to consider initial public offerings.

The removal of restrictions on foreigners owning more than 60 percent of companies that trade on the Dar es Salaam Stock Exchange was published in a Government Gazette dated Sept. 19, Charles Shirima, spokesman for the Capital Markets and Securities Authority, said by phone today from the commercial capital, Dar es Salaam. Investors from the East African Community will also be allowed to buy as much as 40 percent of Tanzanian government securities, he said.

The 11-member Tanzania Share Index gained 73 percent in 2014, the most among 17 African gauges tracked by Bloomberg. Tanzania’s $33 billion economy, the largest in East Africa after Kenya, will expand 7.2 percent this year, according to World Bank estimates.
The country has the most gas reserves in the region after Mozambique, spurring an investment boom, while its mobile-phone penetration rate of 60 percent leaves room for growth for operators, according to Renaissance Capital.

“We’re going to see more IPOs for sure because now companies are going to have access to international capital markets, which they haven’t had before,” Kwame Narh-Saam, head of sub-Sahara trading atRenaissance Capital, said by phone from London. “It’s quite a good story, they’ve got good growth that’s expected to be stable.”

The Dar es Salaam Stock Exchange, which has a market capitalization of 21.9 trillion shillings ($13 billion), is targeting a market value equal to 50 percent of Tanzania’s gross domestic product by 2017, Chief Executive Officer Moremi Marwa said in an interview last month. Finance Ministry Permanent Secretary Servacius Likwelile didn’t answer a call to his mobile phone seeking comment.

‘Something Big’

The bourse is targeting five IPOs by June, with one set for October or November and another two during the first quarter of 2015, Marwa said in a Sept. 10 interview. Three of the companies are in financial services and banking, one in manufacturing and the other in mining, he said, declining to identify them because details aren’t public.

“It seems like the government is putting pressure on the telcos in particular to list,” Narh-Saam said. A share sale by the local unit of Bharti Airtel Ltd. would set a precedent for other mobile-phone companies to follow, he said.

Commodity companies may also seek listings with the country’s gas reserves “set to propel the economy into something big,” Narh-Saam said. “The infrastructure developments that are happening on the ground, you can just see it’s the start of something that’s going to be difficult to ignore.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-25/tanzania-government-lifts-restriction-on-foreign-share-ownership.html