The Luxembourg Stock Exchange is pleased to announce that it reached the milestone of 250 issuers of depositary receipts on 20 July 2011.
These issuers come from seventeen countries in regions as varied as East Asia, South Asia, central Asia, Eastern Europe and South America. In total, they account for 282 quotation lines of depositary receipts on the Luxembourg Stock Exchange. In terms of number of issuers, and based on current data from the various stock markets, the Luxembourg Stock Exchange is the leading exchange in Europe for these instruments and it is in second position worldwide behind the New York Stock Exchange (306 issuers) but ahead of the London Stock Exchange (196 issuers) and Nasdaq (106 issuers).
Depositary receipts are instruments used predominantly by companies in emerging economies to enable them to gain access to international capital markets and therefore to raise capital abroad. The Luxembourg Stock Exchange has a long history of working with such companies. It listed its first depositary receipt, from a Japanese company, in 1964. Today, it primarily lists Global Depositary Receipts or GDRs and the first of these to be listed in Luxembourg, which was also the first in Europe, was in 1990.
The majority of issuing companies come from India and Taiwan. At the time of the listing of the 250th depositary receipt, there were 171 Indian and 48 Taiwanese companies with a total of 242 listed instruments. The activities of all 250 companies on the Exchange are varied and reflect the nature of the economy of the home country. Thus, the majority of the Taiwanese issues are from technology companies, while most Indian issuers are active in construction and industry as well as in fields such as software and biotechnology.
The 250th depositary receipt issuer was the Neo Solar Power Corporation of Taiwan, whose issue was for an amount of USD 128.8 million.
In addition to the listing and trading of depositary receipts, the Luxembourg Stock Exchange has, since 2009, run two specialist indices: the “Lux GDRs India” index and the “Lux GDRs Taiwan” index, the movements of which reflect the trends of the home markets in India and Taiwan.
The reaching of this milestone is a further sign of the position of the Luxembourg Stock Exchange as the leading exchange for international securities.
Breakdown of depositary receipt issuers by country at the Luxembourg Stock Exchange