Volker Potthoff, who is responsible for the cash market on the Deutsche Börse Executive Board, said: "We want to organize our markets consistently in line with the investors' needs in the future. To do this, we will safeguard maximum transparency with clear rules and provide a consistent index world to support their investment decisions." Indirectly, Deutsche Börse is creating the best prerequisites that companies can have to meet their individual financing needs, Potthoff added.
In the future, Deutsche Börse wants to differentiate between two listing segments: "Domestic Standard" with legal minimum transparency requirements, and "Prime Standard" with additional international transparency requirements. Additional requirements for Prime Standard are to be: quarterly reports, international accounting standards (IAS or US-GAAP), presentation of a corporate calendar, at least one analysts conference per year as well as ad-hoc disclosure and ongoing reporting in English. From a regulatory standpoint, Prime Standard thus also replaces the existing trading segments Neuer Markt and SMAX, which are to be discontinued by the end of 2003 at the latest. The target group for Domestic Standard are issuers with more of a national focus, whereas Prime Standard is designed to make access to the international capital market available to issuers.
The new index concept is to be based exclusively on the Prime Standard, only issuers from this segment would qualify for the selection indices of Deutsche Börse. The largest companies in this segment are to be contained in the DAX as they have up to now. Small Caps and Mid Caps will be divided into two groups by sector, with more or less classical sectors as currently in the MDAX and SDAX, or the technology sectors as in the NEMAX.
The legal foundation for the new equity market segmentation is the Fourth Financial Markets Promotion Act, with a comprehensive reform of German stock exchange law. Up to now, the internationally common standards could only be defined in private-sector rules and regulations (Neuer Markt and SMAX) and index guidelines (DAX and MDAX). In the future, on the other hand, all criteria/rules of Domestic und Prime Standard will be established in the public-law Exchange Rules, which ensures enforceability and thus the confidence of investors.