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The London Stock Exchange today welcomed Polyus Gold, Russia’s largest gold producer, to the Main Market where it has issued American Depository Receipts (ADRs). Polyus Gold is an independent company spun out of Norilsk Nickel in March 2006. The company has listed its ADRs in London in order to attract more international investors and take advantage of the International Order Book’s highly liquid trading and investor interest. It will not undertake any fundraising on admission.
Evgueni Ivanov, Chief Executive of Polyus Gold, said:
"Listing on the LSE opens up the exciting opportunities that our leading position in the Russian gold industry represents to investors from around the world and will facilitate wider ownership of Polyus shares.
“We also welcome the greater transparency that the London Stock Exchange listing requires of our business, and are proud to have published an Independent Expert’s Report, an independent valuation of our properties, reserves and resources, prepared by Micon International.
“The LSE offers a highly liquid market that will help us to broaden our range of investors.”
Martin Graham, Director of Markets at the London Stock Exchange, said:
“We’re delighted to welcome Polyus Gold to the Main Market and the International Order Book. Their decision to admit their shares to trading here is a reflection of the high levels of liquidity enjoyed by Russian Global Depositary Receipts in London. With a new index, the FTSE Russia IOB Index, established in October, and new derivatives trading from the start of this month, this is a market that is growing and evolving rapidly.”
Polyus Gold takes the total number of Russian companies traded on the London Stock Exchange’s International Order Book to twenty-six. The companies are traded in the form of Depositary Shares/Receipts, specialist instruments which represent ownership of a given number of a company’s shares and can be listed and traded independently from the underlying shares. Trading in Russian securities on the IOB continues to grow, with the total value traded this year reaching £110 billion, over double the value traded during the same period last year.
The FTSE Russian IOB Index is a market capitalisation weighted index designed to measure the performance of the ten biggest and most liquid Russian Global Depositary Receipts on a real time basis. Since the start of December, EDX London, the London Stock Exchange’s derivatives business, and OMX have offered futures and options based on the ten individual companies in the FTSE Russia IOB Index, as well as on the index itself. This is the first on-exchange service offering trading in Russian GDR derivatives. During the first seven days of the new derivatives service, an average 2,200 contracts have been traded each day.
