The regions with the most potential are:
Lombardy, Emilia Romagna, Piedmont, Veneto, Lazio and Tuscany
With the potential to bring 200 billion Euro in capitalisation to the Italian Stock Exchange list
In recent years, the Italian Stock Exchange has undergone rapid growth in terms of capitalisation, trading volumes and number of listed companies, enabling it to successfully and more effectively represent the economic expanse of the country.
Though ranking fourth in Europe for overall capitalisation, our market still lags behind the main European markets in terms of number of companies. At the end of 2001, there were 288 Italian-based listed companies in the country compared with 1,923 in United Kingdom, 791 in France and 749 in Germany.
It was from these very numbers that Borsa Italiana commenced its investigation into Italy's panorama of listable companies. The objective of the exercise was to show that even though the overall number of companies in Italy large enough to list is less than in France, Germany and United Kingdom, the number of listed companies has always been less marked when compared with the stock markets of the major European countries due to a low propensity to list. Hence, in Italy, there is much scope for ventures and initiatives that aim to expand the Stock Exchange list.
Indeed, Borsa Italiana's survey underscored just how wide the field of listable companies in Italy actually is: there are a total of 1,200 companies not controlled by already listed groups, operating in the industrial and non-financial services field, with the economic features that are necessary for listing (revenues of more than 50 million Euro, more than 50 employees and a positive gross operating spread in either 1998, 1999 or 2000). These companies are mainly small enterprises (75.9% have a turnover of less than 150 million Euro) operating in the industrial sector (69.8% of the total), and a good number of these hold leadership positions in their typically made in Italy manufacturing domains (textiles, leather, ceramics, furniture production, industrial machinery and jewellery).
The regions with the strongest field of potentially listable companies are Lombardy (389 companies), Emilia Romagna (176), Piedmont (119), Veneto (181), Lazio (62) and Tuscany (57).
The overall capitalisation that these Italian companies would bring to the market through listing is in the region of 200 billion Euro.
By subdividing the sample base by respective capitalisation values, it emerged that there are 35 potential blue chips companies (with a capitalisation of more than 800 million Euro); the remaining companies are mid and small caps, of which 780 have a potential capitalisation value of less than 100 million Euro.
It was also found that in the capitalisation that would result from listing the companies identified in the survey, a significant quota would be provided by the non-cyclical consumer goods sectors (that includes the food, pharmaceutical and health care sectors) and cyclical services (meaning distribution, entertainment, media, transport and support services) both of which would contribute 27.7% each. These sectors are followed by cyclical consumer goods producers (car manufacturers, goods for the home and clothing) and basic industries, accounting for 16.2% and 11.4% respectively of overall capitalisation.
Looking at the individual sectors in more detail, the households goods and textiles industries would account for the most significant contribution to overall capitalisation (15.0%, with a sizeable number of medium to large enterprises, even though only one is big enough to make it into the top 10) followed by the pharmaceutical and biotechnology (12.7%), transport (10.6%) and food producers and processors (9.6%).
