UAE’s market cap is simply not enough | The National

UAE’s market cap is simply not enough | The National:

"I am in New York, the primary financial centre in the world, visiting asset managers. The smallest of these managers has a total of about US$500 billion under management. According to the World Bank, the total market capitalisation of domestic listed companies in the UAE was about $195bn at the end last year. The UAE has two primary stock markets, a federal level market regulator in the SCA and at least two offshore financial centres in the DIFC and ADGM, each of which is regulated independently of the other and the SCA.


Maybe looking at total numbers doesn’t make sense as different countries have different GDPs. Fortunately for us the World Bank provides market size as a percentage of GDP. For the UAE, the total market cap of domestic listed companies is 53 per cent of GDP as of the end of last year; for the US it was 140 per cent. For Singapore, a country often held up as a model for the UAE to learn from if not emulate, market cap is 219 per cent of GDP.


For Saudi Arabia, which many assume lags the UAE in fin­ancial innovation, the number is 65 per cent. What saddens me is that the world average is 99 per cent and in terms of the size of our markets relative to GDP we are roughly half the global average."



'via Blog this'