Malaysia Progresses Into FTSE's Advanced Emerging Status In FTSE Global Equity Index Series

Global index provider FTSE Group (FTSE) today announced that Malaysia has been promoted to Advanced Emerging market status from the current Secondary Emerging market status in the FTSE Global Equity Index Series. The promotion to the Advanced Emerging status demonstrates that Malaysia has met FTSE's “Quality of Markets Assessment” criteria in that category. Malaysia will be moved from the FTSE Secondary Emerging Market Indices into the FTSE Advanced Emerging Market Indices, and all parent and sub-indices of these benchmarks, from June 2011.

Dato’ Yusli Mohamed Yusoff, Chief Executive Officer of Bursa Malaysia Berhad said, “We are very pleased with the promotion of Malaysia into the Advanced Emerging category by FTSE as it marks another milestone to the development of our market. This is testament to the efforts taken to build an efficient and quality market and we are now ready to take on a new level of challenge in this upgraded classification of our capital market.   

“This recognition belongs to the whole nation as we have witnessed untiring effort and support given by the Government, the regulators, market participants and investors who are keen to build a market of international quality,” he added.

Malaysia joined the FTSE Watch List for possible inclusion in the Advanced Emerging market status a year ago when FTSE announced the results of its Country Classification Annual Review in September 2009.  Malaysia is hopeful that the reclassification of the Malaysian capital market will see improvement of the weightage of Malaysia in international indices as well as increasing foreign investment inflow.

Please refer to FTSE Country Classification updates on FTSE’s website at www.ftse.com/country .