“The most important task faced by the Russian economy is securing sustainable economic growth, which is impossible to achieve without the rapid growth of innovative companies,” said the MICEX SE CEO Alexei Rybnikov. “This is why we regard the creation of this sector as one of the most important parts of the Exchange’s strategy. The new sector is to be launched in the first half of 2006. In creating the new sector, the MICEX Stock Exchange will rely on cooperation with the professional community, issuers and the regulator of the securities market, the RF Federal Service for Financial Markets.”
It is intended that the sector will be used for IPOs, placement of bond loans and the secondary circulation of securities.
When creating the sector and forming its infrastructure, the MICEX SE will use international experience. In other countries, the innovative segment of the economy is financed through specialized markets of stocks of young, growing companies with small and medium capitalization (micro-caps, small caps, mid caps, new markets, alternative markets). In these markets, stocks of young and profitable high-tech companies are quoted. These companies are prepared to disclose information, split up the ownership structure and make an IPO. All this give national stock markets additional liquidity.
By implementing a number of measures, the new sector intends to provide maximum protection of the interests and rights of investors and secure the appropriate quality of traded instruments.
The sector will establish more stringent transparency standards: besides a routine set of documents and data, a company will have to provide to investors, via the Exchange, some additional documents, including the business plans, the investment memorandum, the corporate calendar showing the issuer’s events over the year, and some other documents.
To improve the transparency of the sector’s companies, it is intended to establish the institute of listing agents. A listing agent is a professional participant in the securities market who is certified by the Exchange and acts as an advisor guaranteeing the validity of information disclosed by a sector’s company when the company’s securities are placed and included into the sector. A listing agent also secures the disclosure of information by a company when the company’s security is maintained in the sector. The institute of listing agents is expected to secure the appropriate protection of investors’ rights and minimize the risk of inauthentic information.
It is intended that companies will be included into the sector on the basis of the following criteria:
- company’s belonging to an appropriate industry (high-tech products, civil products manufactured by defense enterprises, telecoms, web-based businesses, biotechnologies, R&D, mass media companies disseminating their products via the Internet, etc.);
- the use of certain technologies (a company must be implementing a wide range of technological innovations);
- company’s capitalization (within a certain range);
- rates of growth of manufacturing.
When holding IPOs and the primary placement of bond loans, only legal entities and qualified individual investors will be admitted to trading. This is intended to improve the protection of investors who are not experienced in working with innovative fast-growing companies of small and medium capitalization.
To prevent the loss of a company’s value, the sector will impose restrictions on the sale of the management’s own stake during a certain period after the inclusion of a company’s securities into the sector.
